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

This Panel has 3 pending paper proposals.
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