ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the main analytical themes, theoretical challenges, and critical stakes offered by this volume. It explains how one of the key objectives of the book is to explore and theorize the close kinship between necropolitics (or the politics of death and death-making) and the everyday, the mundane, or the ordinary. Too often in critical international relations and political theory circles, the study of biopower and necropolitics has ignored or undermined modes of ordinary death-making that nonetheless make possible contemporary regimes of neoliberal governmentality. This volume seeks to enhance but also to problematize necropolitical as well as biopolitical perspectives by putting necro- and bio-power in contact with instances of death-making in past and present geopolitical contexts that are far from unusual, not so uncommon, not always extreme, or rarely highly visible. This chapter also introduces the various critical interventions on display in this volume. In particular, it highlights the linkage between biopolitics and geopolitics by showing how the following chapters focus on practices, policies, and ideologies that rely upon or deploy certain spatial configurations likely to facilitate and perpetuate mundane modalities of death-making in international relations.
