Necropolitics and Geography

by

Jan Simon Hutta

• LAST MODIFIED: 17 April 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199874002-0289

Introduction

“Necropolitics” denotes powerful processes that segment populations into those whose lives are valued and those who are exposed to death. The term is often used to go beyond analyses narrowly focused on “biopolitics,” i.e., the government and furthering of the life of the population. Instead, the notion of necropolitics centers governmental practices and rationalities that expose certain groups to premature death, whether through direct killing and slaughter or through abandonment and slow violence. Achille Mbembe introduced the term. In his homonymous essay, Mbembe emphasizes the emergence of sovereign power in modernity through colonial capitalism and the slave plantation to draw attention to the persistence in the contemporary world of racialized dehumanization and militarized “terror formations” that cast those deprived of biopolitical care into liminal “death-worlds.” In geography and cognate disciplines, the bulk of writings on necropolitics examine uneven social and spatial formations and associated governing technologies that rely on violence, bordering, confinement, and abandonment. While a main focus has been on racialization, anti-blackness, and Black resistance, various authors also scrutinize the role of gender, sexuality, dis/ability, intersectionality, and more-than-human necropolitics. In doing so, authors consider a range of sites, scales, and spatialities. Most prominently, this includes the camp, zones of exception, and the plantation. These are examined, on the one hand, as locales of deadly violence and, on the other, as contested topologies that subsist across social realms at local and global scales. Likewise, various works engage with prisons and borders as well as carceral spaces and border regimes. Some authors discuss violence-based displacement and dispossession in geopolitical contexts of imperialism, settler-colonialism, resource conflicts, and war, or how globalized capitalist accumulation and extraction create so-called surplus populations and landscapes of waste and toxicity. Urban and political geographers discuss the necropolitical governance of cities, for instance in connection to exclusionary housing politics or militarized, racist, and anti-poor policing in city centers and peripheries. Moreover, attention has been drawn to “deathscapes” and undignified sites of dying and interment, including in oceans, deserts, or “potter’s fields,” as well as practices of commemoration, survival, and resistance emerging in deadly contexts. Finally, some works interrogate the conceptual foundations of necropolitics and discuss methodological challenges arising from doing research in the presence or aftermath of destruction and death. Taken together, debates in geography and cognate fields have generated a rich vocabulary that expands our understanding of deadly power, including notions of “necropolitical governance,” “necrogeopolitics,” “necro-subjection,” “necroviolence,” “necropolis,” “necroburbia,” “necrosettlements,” “necrolandscaping,” and “necroresistance.”

General Overviews

While, as yet, no explicit anthologies are available, several edited volumes discuss necropolitics, including Lopez and Gillespie 2015, which examines the political economies producing “killable” and “grievable” life, and Campbell and Sitze 2013, a reader on biopolitics. Anstett and Dreyfus 2014 extends these discussions by interrogating the materiality of human remains in the aftermath of genocide and mass violence. In geography, notable journal issues and sections include the Antipode special issue “Bio(necro)polis” (McIntyre and Nast 2011) and the Environment and Planning D special section “Race, Biopolitics, and the Future” (Smith and Vasudevan 2017) (for further journal issues, see Migration, Borders, and Camps and More-than-Human Geographies and Making Killable). Special issues and overview papers on related topics also help readers gain an understanding of the debates associated with necropolitics. For example, Tyner 2015 reviews the contributions of population geography in studying the significance of mortality and premature death in the modern ordering of life. Additionally, Comaroff and Comaroff 2006, drawing from political geography and political anthropology, respectively, situates violence committed by both state and nonstate armed actors in a global context. Overall, the journal Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography has become a key arena for the discussion of necropolitics in geography and cognate disciplines. The interdisciplinary Journal of Genocide Research also gathers relevant writings, ranging from engagements with past and present massacres to conceptual reflections.

• Anstett, Élisabeth, and Jean-Marc Dreyfus, eds. Destruction and Human Remains: Disposal and Concealment in Genocide and Mass Violence. Human remains and violence. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2014.

  This interdisciplinary volume connects the materiality of human remains with the ideologies driving mass killings. The contributions examine the organized ways perpetrators and further actors treat corpses resulting from mass violence and genocide. They highlight the political, ideological, and practical dimensions of handling bodies after death, including destruction, concealment, and reuse for material or economic purposes.

• Antipode—A Radical Journal of Geography. 1969–.

  Antipode publishes peer-reviewed papers and further formats that advance critical geography. The journal seeks to promote transformative societal change and emphasizes creative, critical interventions that reshape existing political, social, and, geographical paradigms. It regularly features articles, commentaries, and book reviews that engage with different aspects of necropolitics. In 2011, it featured the special issue “Bio(necro)polis,” edited by Michael McIntyre and Heidi Nast.

• Campbell, Timothy C., and Adam Sitze, eds. Biopolitics: A Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.

  This anthology gathers key philosophical texts that engage Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics from various perspectives. Besides Achille Mbembe’s “Necropolitics,” it also includes a reflection on Warren Montag’s notion of “necro-economics.” The editors provide an insightful introduction to the philosophical debate on bio- and necropolitics.

• Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff, eds. Law and Disorder in the Postcolony. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

  This volume combines political-philosophical reflection with situated research in different African as well as Brazilian and Indonesian contexts. The focus is on how the hegemonic legal order shaped by colonialism and neoliberalism gives rise to endemic violence enacted by both state and nonstate actors. As the editors explain, a focus on the Global South throws into sharp relief the violent conditions of the contemporary world order at large.

• Journal of Genocide Research. 1999–.

  While placing an emphasis on political science and history, this journal features papers on genocide, war crimes, and related phenomena from a range of disciplines. Special issues have a historical, regional, event-related, or conceptual focus, e.g., “Colonial Violence and Monuments in Global History,” “Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union,” and the “Genocide-Ecocide Nexus.” These should be of special interest to scholars researching specific necropolitical sites and topics.

• Lopez, Patricia J., and Kathryn A. Gillespie, eds. Economies of Death: Economic Logics of Killable Life and Grievable Death. London: Routledge, 2015.

  This edited collection gathers works from the humanities and social sciences that examine how capitalist commodification renders certain lives killable, setting them apart from those whose deaths are grieved. The contributions use case studies from a range of historical and geographic contexts to engage with the economies of both human and animal death.

• McIntyre, Michael, and Heidi J. Nast, eds. Special Issue: Bio(necro)polis: Marx, Surplus Population, and the Spatial Dialectics of Reproduction and “Race.” Antipode 43.5 (2011).

  This special issue approaches necropolitics from perspectives that center the Marxist notion of “surplus population” in connection to racialization. The contributions cover a range of issues and contexts, from military recruitment in the United Kingdom or deindustrialization in northern Italy to the garment export industry in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Conceptually, several papers examine the ways in which capitalist surplus accumulation systematically produces things, spaces, and even humans as “waste.”

• Smith, Sara, and Pavithra Vasudevan, eds. Special Section: Race, Biopolitics, and the Future. Special Section. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 35.2 (2017).

  DOI: 10.1177/0263775817699494

  The biopolitics of race and futurity that render some lives valuable while exposing others to death are at the focus of this special journal section. The papers specifically examine racialized technologies and structures of reproduction, for instance, in the context of surrogacy markets, as well as political contestations, as in Black infant mortality reduction campaigns.

• Tyner, James A. “Population Geography II: Mortality, Premature Death, and the Ordering of Life.” Progress in Human Geography 39.3 (2015): 360–373.

  DOI: 10.1177/0309132514527037

  This progress report considers how works from the field of population geography contribute to ongoing debates on necropolitics. It highlights engagement in the field with the notion of “premature death,” which has emerged as part of the modern biopolitics of risk prevention and now undergirds bioeconomic forms of making mortality governable and profitable.