P120: Grief and the Contestation of Necropolitics: State Power and Resistance in Everyday Experiences of Death and Dying

P120

Grief and the Contestation of Necropolitics: State Power and Resistance in Everyday Experiences of Death and Dying

Convenors:: Natashe Lemos Dekker (University of Amsterdam)
Ruth Toulson (Maryland Institute College of Art)
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Formats:: Panel

Short Abstract

This panel considers the fields of power at play in dying and death. We examine the political work of grieving as a site of regulation and contestation of necropolitics as it is implicitly woven into the everyday.

Long Abstract

This panel considers the fields of power at play in dying, death, and grief. Necropolitics, as the exercise of control through death, is often violent and disruptive, but can also take the form of implicit mechanisms woven into the ordinary—whether it is through state regulation and policies, capitalist development, algorithms and data, or through systemic exclusion and neglect.

In this panel, we are interested in how necropolitical contexts affect experiences and expressions of grief. On the one hand, this question explores the ways in which control and power become enmeshed with which lives are grieved and in what manner (Butler 2004). On the other hand, it addresses what might emerge when grief itself is politicized. How do (in)justice and (mis)recognition, as well as questions of accountability and responsibility become entangled with experiences of grief? How does formal and informal memorialization challenge necropolitical powers? And how does necropolitics affect the social fabric of continuing life in the face of death and dying?

We invite ethnographic and conceptual accounts on the regulation and contestation of death and grief understood as political sites, and which expose the relation between (state) power, dying, and grieving. Reflecting on these questions, we seek to unpack the political work that is done to challenge necropolitics, to demonstrate the forces, counterforces, and acts of care that shape responses to death and its aftermath.

Accepted papers

Session 1

Grief, Body–Territory, and Life-Making: Co-Building Kurdish and Latin American Feminist Pedagogies through Mingas del Buen Vivir

Dilan Bozgan (Columbia Global Center in Santiago, Columbia University)

Paper short abstract

An ethnography of Mingas del Buen Vivir examines how memory politics become feminist pedagogies of life-making. Focusing on a community space in Argentina built through collective labor, the paper explores how grief and joy operate as political forces linking Latin American and Kurdish feminisms.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how collective emotions, memory politics, and embodied pedagogies sustain forms of life-making in contexts marked by necropolitics. It draws on an ethnography of the Mingas del Buen Vivir—collective labor practices with Indigenous roots—through which the Espacio Alina has been built since 2020 in the province of Córdoba, Argentina. Convened by the education collective Pañuelos en Rebeldía, the Espacio is a site where material construction, ecological practices, and feminist learning unfold, bringing together activists transnationally.

Named after Alina, an Argentine medical doctor who lost her life while participating in community health practices promoted by the Kurdish Women’s Movement in northern Syria, the Espacio is grounded in a dialogue between Latin American and Kurdish feminisms. Central to its constitution was the donation of the land by Alina’s mother, an act through which grief is transformed into a memorial practice that contests necropolitical logics of disposability and inscribes the Espacio within Argentine traditions of mothers’ activism and memory politics.

Drawing on participant observation as a co-constructor in the Mingas, I explore how bodies and territories are re-signified as spaces of memory, political grammars, alternative pedagogies, and embodied forms of resistance. Rather than focusing on spectacular death or state violence alone, I analyze how memories of activist women whose lives were taken become forces which act across generations and geographies. These practices reconfigure grief as pedagogy and an affective archive, through which collective labor, spirituality, and body–territory imaginaries sustain feminist life-making and contest necropolitics regulate whose lives are grievable.

Grief Politics: COVID-19-related Loss and Collective Action in Brazil

Natashe Lemos Dekker (University of Amsterdam)

Ordinary Necropolitics: State Power and Everyday Death in Contemporary Singapore

Ruth Toulson (Maryland Institute College of Art)

Where the Tigers Sleep. Death, Shame, and Grief in Indonesian Export Processing Zone

Davide Blotta (University of Urbino)

Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research in Batam, Indonesia, this paper examines vengeful ghosts arising from suicides, unsafe abortions, and childbirth deaths among migrant workers.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2025 among migrant workers in Batam, Indonesia, this paper examines death, haunting, and grief as sites where necropolitical power is both enacted and contested within an Export Processing Zone. Indonesia records one of the highest numbers of unreported suicides globally, with Riau Province ranking among those with the highest suicide rates. Batam, an island in Riau, has undergone rapid transformation—from a population of approximately 3,000 residents in 1970 to a global hub for shipbuilding and electronics manufacturing hosting over one million internal migrants—and is widely described by workers as a “haunted” landscape.

In Indonesia, deaths linked to suicide, unsafe abortion, and childbirth complications are frequently classified as mati tidak baik (“bad deaths”), which in local cosmology are understood to generate vengeful ghosts. These are mediators through which workers and families articulate otherwise silenced experiences of exploitation, shame (malu), and ungrievable loss. These hauntings index necropolitical conditions under which certain lives are rendered expendable and particular deaths excluded from public mourning. Central to this process is malu—understood as moral restraint and shame—which regulates both labour discipline and mourning practices, often producing silence that forecloses accountability while protecting families from scandal.

Within this context, the paper situates nocturnal ethnography conducted in a local silat school. Nocturnal silat practice—particularly graveyard rituals and spirit invocation—reconfigures deathscapes into an embodied politics of resistance, drawing on Indo-Islamic values, mysticism, and anticolonial traditions of night training, through which death and grief are reclaimed from industrial necropolitical erasure.

Session 2

They are New Yorkers too: reclaiming the Hart Island dead

Sally Raudon (University of Cambridge)

Where Grief is Allowed to Sit: Memorial Benches, Policy, and the Necropolitical Governance of Mourning

Anna Malpas (University of Oxford)

Paper short abstract

This paper examines memorial benches in England as unevenly regulated sites of public grief. It shows how fragmented local policies create uncertainty and unequal access to mourning practice, and how mourners contest this necropolitical governance through unauthorised interventions and practices.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines memorial benches in England as sites of the regulation, contestation, and mediation of grief. Memorial benches, omnipresent in parks, public spaces, and remote rural settings, are often framed as benign sites of remembrance that serve a perceived public good. Yet they are governed by a fragmented landscape of local policies that vary widely in terms of permitted wording, materials, duration, and even whether their presence is allowed at all. Drawing on ethnographic research with mourners, local councils, and makers, this paper explores how the lack of standardisation across memorial bench regulations produces uncertainty, distress, and unequal access to an important memorial practice.

I argue that these regulatory inconsistencies constitute a form of implicit necropolitics, enacted not through overt state violence, but through mundane bureaucratic practices that shape which deaths are publicly acknowledged, and how grief may be expressed. In response, mourners often engage in small but significant acts of contestation or resistance, such as attaching unauthorised plaques, modifying benches, or placing additional memorial paraphernalia.

By foregrounding memorial benches as sites of negotiation between private mourning and public regulation, this paper contributes to anthropological discussions of necropolitics by highlighting how institutional power operates through ordinary infrastructures and administrative ambiguity. It also shows how acts of remembrance can unsettle regulatory authority, reworking public space as a terrain of affect, attachment and memory. In doing so, the paper demonstrates how grief not only responds to necropolitical conditions, but actively shapes the landscapes in which death is both remembered and materialised.

Grievable Lives and Brief States: Necropolitics, Victimhood, and Stray-Bullet Deaths in Chile

Constanza Tizzoni (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile)

Paper short abstract

This paper is based on ethnographic research in Chile and examines how stray-bullet deaths in marginalized neighborhoods produce brief and selective state responses that are shaped by moral economies of grievability.

Paper long abstract

In recent years, Chilean media outlets have frequently reported on deaths caused by stray bullets, portraying them as symbols of public insecurity. These events occur in marginalized municipalities plagued by territorial stigma, where firearms are commonplace and state protection is unevenly distributed due to suspicion and neglect. Public narratives often link these shootings to drug trafficking, using them to promote increasingly punitive security agendas and harsher penalties. In these neighborhoods, lethal violence is structurally patterned, revealing internal boundaries within democratic rule that differentiate between lives that are actively protected and lives that are habitually exposed (Stoler, 2022).

Based on long-term ethnographic research with a family following the death of their infant child in 2019, this paper analyzes how highly publicized deaths result in a temporary and exceptional state presence. Through promises of justice and discretionary ex gratia pensions, state intervention eventually dissipates. These transfers reflect a neoliberal state that relates to the poor through conditional assistance. In this model, recognition depends on implicit criteria of deservingness and conditioned citizenship (Rojas, 2020).

I argue that this uneven landscape of state recognition is sustained by moral economies of grievability (Butler, 2004). This hierarchy ensures that only those who conform to the "ideal victim" (Christie, 1986) trigger exceptional responses, while other deaths—contaminated by territorial stigma—remain morally ambiguous and are quietly displaced (Han, 2015, 2017). This research exposes how necropolitical regimes distribute the right to be recognized as a victim and how families contest these regimes through their everyday experiences of grief.

Between Graves and Grief: Care, Governance and the Ethics of Dying Across the Indian Ocean

Benna Fathima (Ashoka University)

Paper short abstract

Examining deaths displaced from Lakshadweep islands to the Indian mainland, this paper analyses the separation of graves and grief which reorganises ethics of care, mourning and memory. It traces how necropolitical arrangements of health infrastructure reshapes grief across oceanic death circuits.

Paper long abstract

Within the mobile maritime worlds of the Indian Ocean, death and the dead circulate continuously. Graves, bodies, and memories shift across shores, making simultaneous claims to sea and land, and placing grief and memory within mobile geographies. Drawing on the anthropology of death and island studies, this paper follows the everyday politics of healthcare, death, and burial as they unfold for patients medically referred from the Lakshadweep Islands, a fragile maritime border of the Indian subcontinent, to the mainland in search of advanced care. For the Muslim-majority islanders, embalming and post-mortem procedures are religiously discouraged, and the imperative for swift burial often prevents the return of the deceased to their homeland. This produces a critical rupture: bodies are interred in distant lands, while grief remains anchored in the islands. How do islanders reckon with loss when the material remnants of the dead are permanently distanced? How are care and ethical acts enacted across these shifting terrains of life, death, memory and mourning? How does the uneven presence and absence of health infrastructure in the peripheries shape the circuits through which death is produced and managed? Through oral narratives, ethnographic fieldwork, and archival analysis of burial and medical records, the paper traces how this separation of graves and grief generates discursive, historical, and political proximities. In doing so, it shows how necropolitical arrangements embedded in everyday infrastructures of care and neglect disrupt claims to belonging, autochthony, and identity, while reshaping the conditions of mourning and healing in the aftermath of death.

Session 3

Suspended Deaths, Unequal Grief: Navigating Dis/appearance at the Mediterranean Border

Giulia Sezzi (Scuola Normale Superiore)

Paper short abstract

This contribution examines enforced disappearance at the Mediterranean border as a necropolitical mechanism producing unequal regimes of grief. Drawing on research with survivors and families of the missing, it shows how grief is unevenly politicized across positions of power, absence, and survival.

Paper long abstract

The Mediterranean border has increasingly become a necropolitical space, in which enforced disappearance operates as a regulative function, producing suspended and differential forms of grief. In the absence of a body, those affected by disappearance engage with death in uneven ways. Survivors who remain trapped within the border zone often lack the temporal and material conditions necessary to grieve. At the same time, survivors and the families of the missing may redirect grief into contentious practices aimed at producing evidence, mobilizing political pressure, and seeking accountability. For others, mourning is perceived as impossible without the recovery of the body, leading to the abandonment of the search and the adoption of fatalistic interpretations of loss. Grief, therefore, is not politicized everywhere or by everyone in the same way, as it is shaped by the material, legal, and relational positions of actors within the necropolitical regime. Disappearance emerges as a contested field in which some actors engage in a politics of re/appearance, understood not as a mere quest for visibility and recognition, but as an ongoing negotiation with death, absence, and border violence. The contribution draws on ethnographic research centred on a case of enforced disappearance produced by the Tunisian–European border regime involving families from Sierra Leone. By following disappeared individuals, survivors who reappear, and relatives located in countries of origin, the study demonstrates how disappearance functions as a necropolitical condition, generating multiple forms of grief, ways of seeking meaning and pursuing justice.

Contested Restitution: Bodies, Truth, and Political Grief at Europe's Borders

Michela Lovato

Paper short abstract

This paper examines the concept of restitution in cases of border deaths. Analysing how families, authorities, and solidarity actors negotiate the meanings of bodies found at the border, I consider restitution an ongoing political process involving material, epistemic, and political dimensions.

Paper long abstract

This paper problematizes the concept of restitution in the context of border deaths and disappearances. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Morocco and Croatia, this article follows the traces of Yasser and Ahmed, two Moroccan men disappeared along the Balkan route, whose bodies were subsequently found along the border. Through these cases, I analyze how different actors—families, state authorities, and solidarity networks—negotiate meanings of the bodies, bringing to light contrasting conceptions of truth. The returned body becomes a site where necropolitical control and resistance meet. In the cases of Yasser and Ahmed, border authorities manage the remains through practices that depoliticize death, extending the border's logic of erasure beyond life itself. Families engage in processes of reappropriation, claiming truth as political recognition and, in one case, refusing to accept the repatriation of the body whitout accountability. Solidarity actors, in turn, reinscribe the bodies within mobilization practices, integrating them into collective demands for justice.

I argue that restitution emerge as an ongoing political process, involving multiple dimensions: material (the body itself), epistemic (the truth about the circumstances of death), and structural (the transformation of the conditions that produce disappearance). By keeping the dead politically alive—suspended between an unrecognized life and a depoliticized death—families and solidarity actors refuse the necropolitical management of absence. Instead, they sustain an insistent demand that disrupts attempts at depoliticization, transforming the body into a haunting presence that resists silencing: simultaneously an instrument of sovereign power and a testimony that refuses erasure.

Counting the Missing, Making Kin: Grief and Politics after Mediterranean Shipwrecks

Giorgia Mirto (Columbia University)

Paper short abstract

Based on ethnography with NGOs supporting missing migrants in Sicily, this paper examines how activists mobilize grief after shipwrecks as political labor. It shows how politics emerges from death through the making of kinship ties, generating moral legitimacy and claims beyond necropolitics.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the early stages of mourning in the aftermath of migrant shipwrecks, focusing on how grief, anger, and death recognition are cultivated and mobilized by NGOs supporting families of the missing in Palermo and Lampedusa. Based on multi-sited ethnography—including in-person meetings, online assemblies, internal communication and press releases, and interviews—I analyze how affective labor sustains trans-Mediterranean ties while shaping political legitimacy, kinship claims, and organizational positioning.

I ask how activist groups circulate grief and anger in their engagement with families of the missing, and how these affects become infrastructures for political action and moral authority. Immediately after a shipwreck, activists mobilize to determine how many people have died, how many remain missing, and where bodies will be landed—information often accessed through informal maritime solidarity networks rather than state authorities. Families are central not only for identification processes but also as sources of legitimacy for NGOs. The mandate to “support families” is contested across organizations, producing political tensions over access, representation, and responsibility. Interlocutors describe becoming “relatives” of the missing, or envisioning NGOs as kin-like entities, revealing how affective proximity becomes a form of authorization.

I situate these dynamics within a reinterpretation of grief as culturally and politically constituted (Scheper-Hughes 1992), intertwined with the formation of kinship with strangers at the border. I argue that mourning practices become sites where necropolitical governance is negotiated, contested, and partially reworked, illuminating how care, accountability, and political claims emerge through affective labor.

'Multi-Scenic Funerals': Transformative Procedures and Responses to Dead and Missing Muslim Migrants at Spain’s Borders

Nadya Jaziri Arjona (Humboldt University Berlin)

Session 4

“Waiting for news”. Suspended mourning and the politics of death among Belgian families of so-called Syria ‘foreign-fighters’.

Nadia Fadil (KU Leuven)

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how mourning is reshaped when death is governed through the logics of counter-terrorism. Drawing on ethnographic research with Belgian families whose children left to fight in Syria after 2011, it explores what it means to grieve under conditions of suspicion and stigma.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how mourning is reshaped when death is governed through the logics of counter-terrorism. Drawing on ethnographic research with Belgian families whose children left to fight in Syria after 2011 and died there, it explores what it means to grieve under conditions of suspicion, stigma, and political ambiguity. Rather than approaching mourning as a bounded ritual or a linear process, the paper conceptualises it as an unstable and contested practice, shaped by state power and the absence of certainty. I introduce the notion of suspended mourning to capture the specific temporal, affective, and political conditions under which these families experience loss. Suspension does not indicate an absence of grief, but its continuous deferral and social containment. This suspension operates on three interconnected levels. First, governmental: death is difficult to administer when bodies are absent, information is partial, and legal recognition remains uncertain. Second, affective: the lack of official confirmation sustains hope, doubt, and anticipation. Third, representational: public expressions of mourning are constrained by dominant discourses that frame those who died in Syria through categories of terrorism, disloyalty, and moral deviance. By tracing how families navigate these overlapping forms of suspension, the paper shows how mourning becomes a site where the afterlives of counter-terrorism policies are lived and negotiated. I argue that suspended mourning reveals not only the limits imposed on grief, but also the ways families actively rework memory, kinship, and moral belonging in the shadow of securitised regimes of death.

DEATH,DOCUMENTS,AND DIGNITY: GRIEF AS A SITE OF CONTESTING NECROPOLITICS IN ASSAM

DEBASREETA DEB (UNIVERSITY OF HYDERABAD)

Paper short abstract

In post-NRC Assam, grief is deeply political. Hyperdocumentation and bureaucratic scrutiny shape who can mourn and how, yet communities resist through rituals, care, and memorials, asserting dignity, belonging, and quiet defiance, revealing the entanglement of state power, death, and everyday life.

Paper long abstract

My paper examines how state power, everyday governance, and moral anxieties converge in experiences of death and grieving in contemporary India. Drawing on ongoing doctoral research on the aftermath of the Assam NRC process particularly among Muslim residents who find themselves hyperdocumented yet perpetually scrutinized—I explore how necropolitics operates not only through the threat of exclusion but also through the quieter, slower violence that shapes how communities grieve. When a life is rendered precarious or conditionally recognized by the state, death becomes an intensified site of politics: who mourns, who is allowed to mourn publicly, and whose death is rendered administratively suspicious or socially illegible?

Through ethnographic moments—funeral gatherings delayed by verification protocols, families navigating contradictory bureaucratic instructions, or disputes around identity in death certificates—I show how grief becomes an arena in which the state’s classificatory power does not end with life but extends into the rituals, memories, and social claims that follow death. Yet grief is not only regulated; it is also mobilized. My interlocutors use mourning practices to assert belonging, reaffirm inter-community solidarities, and subtly challenge the necropolitical sorting that marks them as perpetually “provable” subjects.

By foregrounding these everyday practices of care, memorialization, and quiet defiance, the paper argues that grief offers a lens to understand both the reach of necropolitics and the possibilities of resistance embedded in ordinary life. Attending to death and its aftermath thus reveals not only how power is exercised but also how communities insist on life, recognition, and dignity beyond it.

Revolutionary Suicide as a Way of Fighting and Grieving Necropolitics in Post-Coup Sudan

Saskia Jaschek (Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies)

Paper short abstract

This paper discusses the affective and political strategy of “revolutionary suicide” as employed by Sudan’s revolutionaries to manage their grief and politically respond to the military’s necropolitics after their 2021 coup d’état.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how, under the necropolitical conditions produced by Sudan’s 2021 military coup, Sudan’s street revolutionary movement managed and politicized grief through embodied protest. Drawing on one year of ethnographic research in post-coup Khartoum, the paper shows how different forms of grief generated distinct modes of resistance.

The analysis forms part of my doctoral project, which investigates shifts in street-level resistance as the political situation deteriorated and culminated in the outbreak of war in April 2023. During this period, protestors were increasingly confronted with death, the collapse of revolutionary expectations, and the erosion of revolutionary futures.

The paper departs from what one interlocutor, drawing on Black Panther co-founder Huey P. Newton’s (1973) concept of “revolutionary suicide,” described as the decision to continue protesting despite the high likelihood of death. I argue that this framing enabled protesters to reconfigure overwhelming power relations, sustaining political agency amid necropolitical governance and exhaustion. Revolutionary suicide did not signify a desire for death, but an ethical and political orientation toward life where death had been normalized.

In this sense, street protest became a way of enacting grief and political agency. Having lost friends and comrades, remaining in the streets sustained the possibility of revolution for which others had died. By foregrounding revolutionary suicide as an emic concept, the paper illuminates the relational dynamics of necropolitics, grief, agency, and temporality, showing how necropolitics shapes not only who may live or die, but how the living endure, relate to one another, and imagine political futures.

Rituals of Resistance: Hemispheric Grief Regimes and the Contestation of Necropolitics

Grace Amoah (University of Pittsburgh)