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- Convenors:
-
Maria Padron Hernandez
(Malmö University)
Marlene Schäfers (Utrecht University)
Nina Gren (Lund University)
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- Discussant:
-
Yael Navaro
(University of Cambridge)
- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
Long-term military occupations are brutal cases of polarization in the contemporary world. This panel explores how the necropolitics of these military occupations render death and dying sites of domination, contestation and resistance.
Long Abstract
Under long-term military occupations, doctrines of supremacy structure politics and governance, making them brutal cases of polarization in the contemporary world.
Anthropology is uniquely positioned to examine how such doctrines affect occupied peoples’ lives and how dominance is accommodated and contested in the mundane as well as the extraordinary. In these contexts, dominance is upheld by different degrees of necropolitical violence, aiming at stifling the social reproduction of occupied peoples. Where such extreme violence inflicts systematic suffering, death and even genocide, the meanings and practices surrounding death and dying regularly become contested. Because death and the afterlife are unstable sites of governance, they threaten to undo the polarization on which occupation regimes rely by creating ambiguity, dilemmas and anxieties. Gruesome deaths might for instance be hidden away in mass-graves by perpetrators and/or be the locus of political mobilisation among those oppressed. People living under occupation (or in exile due to occupation) therefore often engage their dead, their grief and their rituals to create counter-narratives, asserting dignity, belonging and justice.
We invite presentations that explore death and dying in different contexts of military occupation. Examples include looking at death as a site for asserting or contesting claims to sovereignty; exploring dead bodies as symbolic loci for the (re-)ordering of political authority, morality and identity; examining how death relates to the geographies of occupation by defying borders; or focusing on how the governance of death and afterlives intersects with forms of capitalist extraction through the exploitation of occupied people’s material, affective and spiritual life force
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This paper examines how death and burial are managed under military occupation when family members are in exile or unable to act. Focusing on Crimea, it explores representation, silence, and the conditions under which a death can be considered socially “proper”.
Paper long abstract
This paper offers an ethnographically grounded account of how “a proper death” becomes conditional under military occupation. It draws on long-term engagement with Crimea under Russian occupation and focuses on moments when a person dies while family members are in exile, cannot enter the peninsula, or avoid visible involvement. Death turns into a practical problem of representation. Someone must be recognised as entitled to act and carry the death through procedures that make burial possible.
Religious repression in occupied Crimea is well documented. Religious belonging does not, by itself, organise access to burial in everyday practice. Islam, for example, remains institutionally legible within Russian frameworks of governing religion. The paper therefore treats religion as a channel through which death is made administratively workable, rather than as the main explanation of vulnerability.
The core argument is that occupation governs death through conditions sensed and navigated in ordinary life. “Proper” is used here in a narrow, local sense: a death that can be completed without drawing unwanted attention. This depends on who is able to speak, who can sign, which forms of mourning can appear, and how silence is maintained around politically sensitive loss.
When family members are absent, responsibility shifts to neighbours, distant relatives, local religious actors, or administrative intermediaries. This alters who has control over the death and its aftermath. The paper shows how sovereignty is exercised through everyday decisions around burial and mourning, and how it is navigated through silence and delegation.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how deaths of the 2008 war and Russian occupation are currently invoked in Georgian political discourse. Re-enlivened, they turn past sacrifice into present mobilisation: as sites of contested sovereignty and sources of resistance seeking to repair fractured political horizons.
Paper long abstract
“Why is Giorgi Antsukhelidze not at home today?” This question was asked rhetorically by commission chair Tea Tsulukiani in April 2025 during a parliamentary inquiry into the political decisions surrounding the 2008 Russo-Georgian war. The war caused more than 2,000 injured and dead and left 20% of Georgian territory under Russian occupation. Tsulukiani’s remark was followed by the claim that Antsukhelidze, who was brutally killed during the hostilities and is widely regarded as a national hero, had been “pointlessly doomed for someone’s PR” — that “someone” being then-president Saakashvili, and the alleged “PR” depicting Russia as an evil aggressor. The statement sparked immediate public outrage; within hours, a rally had formed to protest what many saw as a treasonous insult to Antsukhelidze and other heroes martyred in the war and the ongoing occupation.
This paper traces the contemporary reappearance and circulation of figures such as Antsukhelidze in Georgian political discourse. As the work of the Tsulukiani commission illustrates, their deaths are increasingly invoked as examples of “death in vain,” instrumentalised to discredit political rivals and recast the moral narrative of the 2008 war. Yet these attempts at reframing are met with popular insistence that the deaths of those confronting the Russian occupier can never be rendered meaningless. Departing from this tension, I examine how deaths caused by Russian occupation are presently re-enlivened, turning past sacrifice into present mobilisation: as sites of contested sovereignty and as sources of popular resistance seeking to repair the fractured political horizons these heroes died defending.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines death and funerary practices among internally displaced persons (IDPs from Abkhazia) living in Georgia proper, focusing on how the place of death and burial becomes a crucial site for negotiating belonging, sovereignty, and the condition of non-return.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines death and funerary practices among internally displaced persons (IDPs) from Abkhazia living in Georgia proper, focusing on how the place of death and burial becomes a crucial site for negotiating belonging, sovereignty, and the condition of non-return. Decades after displacement, return remains largely impossible, yet death reopens questions that everyday life in protracted displacement often suspends: where should one be buried?
Drawing on ethnographic research among IDP communities, the paper focuses on how death and funerals expose the unresolved temporality of displacement. Many IDPs express a desire to be buried “at home”, even when this wish cannot be fulfilled. Burials conducted in Georgia proper thus become acts of substitution and deferral, transforming graves and funerals into spaces where displacement and non-return are re-inscribed. At the same time, attempts to transport bodies across occupation lines, or visiting funerals in Abkhazia, reveal how death unsettles the governance of borders and the de-facto authorities’ claim to permanence.
By foregrounding death in a context of non-return, the paper argues that funerals function as sites of social reproduction, where displaced communities try to reaffirm hope and moral ownership of land they cannot access. These practices generate ambiguity which lays bare the polarising logic of non-return, refusing both full assimilation into the host landscape and the erasure of claims to the occupied territories. In this way, death emerges as a critical arena through which IDPs contest the finality of displacement and sustain political and affective attachments beyond the limits imposed on life.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores the necropolitical question of who gets to mourn in militarised borderlands. Drawing on funerals in Pergamos, Cyprus, I argue that burials are states of exception that legitimise sovereignty, and that border control is co-constitutive between the dead, the bereaved, and states.
Paper long abstract
Necropolitics has brought to light that borders are spaces where who gets to live and die is determined through the question of who gets to cross (Mbembe 2003, 11). The question of who gets to cross to mourn in borderlands can be equally political. My year-long ethnographic field site, Pergamos, is a village inhabited by Turkish-Cypriots that is administratively and spatially divided between the de facto Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) and the British Sovereign Base Areas administration. The village graveyard sits on the British-controlled side, meaning villagers have to cross militarised checkpoints between the two territories to visit their deceased ancestors. While stricter regulations are usually enforced in everyday crossings, people invoke their right to visit their deceased to negotiate crossing discretions with Turkish-Cypriot border officers, using moral obligations towards the dead - a value shared between the village community and the officers - against the border.
Uniquely, during funerals, British and TRNC border enforcement recedes and the checkpoint boom barrier is lifted. Funerals become an informal state of exception where attendees cross without checks. I argue that the suspensions, discretions, and exceptions these states make in relation to the dead and the bereaved community normalise and soften their coercive presence and ensure the sustainability of the status quo. As such, I propose that border control becomes collectively co-constitutive between the dead, the bereaved, and the states through their shared values.
Paper short abstract
This presentation focuses on Palestinian families whose martyr was withheld by Israel or had been released after long waiting. These ritualcides had complex effects. Not being able to carry out rituals provoked grief, disbelief, conspiracy and tensions, but at times led to politicisation.
Paper long abstract
The term ritualcide is used to distinguish the ways violent authoritarian regimes prevent or tamper with rituals of people they rule, often occurring in tandem with genocide and politicide. One part of the Israeli politics in Palestine today can be understood as an escalating ritualcide. The Israeli necropower is increasingly preventing Palestinians from burying and in other ways caring for their dead ones as to inflict harm socially, politically and spiritually on Palestinian families and nation. This seems to have reached its extreme in Gaza where Israel returns Palestinian bodies in unmarked body bags and in unrecognizable shapes due to torture and decay, making identification and proper rituals difficult, if not impossible. However, since long, Palestinians have struggled to care for and commemorate people who have died as martyrs. Martyrs’ funerals have often been delayed or not carried out at all because the Israeli authorities refrain from releasing the bodies to mourning families. Alternatively, bodies are only released under certain conditions such as holding the funeral without a public procession and at night.
This presentation primarily builds on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the West Bank in early 2023. I focus on some families whose martyr was still withheld by Israel or had been released after months of waiting. I discuss the complex effects of and responses to these ritualcides among my interlocutors. Not being able to carry out rituals and seeing the body provoked grief, disbelief, conspiracy and tensions within families but at times led to politicisation.
Paper short abstract
What happens when military occupation attempts to impose its sovereignty over the lives and deaths of the people that it occupies? And what happens if these lives keep escaping in and out of borders, threading a defiance for both death as well as occupation?
Paper long abstract
What happens when military occupation attempts to impose its sovereignty over the lives and deaths of the people that it occupies? What happens when these lives keep escaping in and out of borders, sustained by a defiance for death and dense webs of kinship that stretch across and within the securitised lines of control? For this is what happens in the Golan Heights, where four stateless Syrian villages have resisted the imposition of Israeli occupation and refused the manipulation of their Druze identities. Under Israeli occupation since 1967, continuous human rights violations, settler-colonial land-grabbing, the stateless Syrian Druze communities continue to resist Israeli occupation and remain connected with families and communities across the multiple securitised borders that Israel has set up. And hence, a missing Syrian man is born again in Lebanon, and then his funeral held by his extended family in the Golan. A grandmother lactates again after her dead son returns to her family as her grandson. And a sense of justice served posthumously when the dead returns to confer justice. Thinking with these returns of the dead through multiple borders, I wonder what reincarnation and resistance can tell us about life, death and the threads of kinship that are able to piece together a fragile but also enduring alternative sovereignty.