ABSTRACT

Necrogeopolitics: On Death and Death-Making in International Relations brings together a diverse array of critical IR scholars, political theorists, critical security studies researchers, and critical geographers to provide a series of interventions on the topic of death and death-making in global politics.

Contrary to most existing scholarship, this volume does not place the emphasis on traditional sources or large-scale configurations of power/force leading to death in IR. Instead, it details, theorizes, and challenges more mundane, perhaps banal, and often ordinary modalities of violence perpetrated against human lives and bodies, and often contributing to horrific instances of death and destruction. Concepts such as "slow death," "soft killing," "superfluous bodies," or "extra/ordinary" destruction/disappearance are brought to the fore by prominent voices in these fields alongside more junior creative thinkers to rethink the politics of life and death in the global polity away from dominant IR or political theory paradigms about power, force, and violence.

The volume features chapters that offer thought-provoking reconsiderations of key concepts, theories, and practices about death and death-making along with other chapters that seek to challenge some of these concepts, theories, or practices in settings that include the Palestinian territories, Brazilian cities, displaced population flows from the Middle East, sites of immigration policing in North America, and spaces of welfare politics in Scandinavian states.

chapter |14 pages

Introduction

Necrogeopolitics and death-making

chapter 1|19 pages

Not a state of exception

Weak state killing as a mode of neoliberal governmentality

chapter 2|17 pages

Political incompetence and death-making

An outline of unsuitable governance

chapter 3|17 pages

On the loss of death

Necropolitics in the study of genocide

chapter 8|21 pages

The kill zone

Choreographies of life at the limits of a death-world

chapter 9|20 pages

Specters of schmaltz

Aesthetics, death, and the haunting of communist kitsch

chapter 10|20 pages

The earth’s dying body

On the necroeconomy of planetary collapse