Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how state interventions to conserve charismatic species imagine and enroll 'wild' life, death, and desire. It further examines how tiger conservation efforts in India rework and reproduce wild–life and a more-than-human politics of caste and gender.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how state interventions predicated on conserving charismatic species imagine and enroll 'wild' life, death, and desire. Taking the example of tiger conservation projects in India, it further examines how the effort to reproduce charismatic wild–life, and specifically the tiger, is wrapped up in a more-than-human politics of caste and gender. It considers particular life-, death-, and desire- dealing interventions carried out in the name of tiger conservation in India in recent years – set against the context of global conservation regimes that dehumanize people who live increasingly precarious lives alongside charismatic species, post-colonial regimes that differentially value certain animal lives over those of certain humans – often with death-dealing implications, and caste logics of protecting and reproducing purity. This paper argues that conservation imaginaries of and interventions into wild–life become manifest in landscapes marked as Tiger Reserves and in the bodies, mobilities, and relations of 'wild' tigers and the humans whose lives are "gathered with" theirs (Govindrajan, 2018). This in turn points to newer ways in which caste-based and gendered notions of life, death, and reproduction are reworked to sustain relations of power.

Presentation short abstract

This paper integrates Judith Butler's politics of mourning into necropolitical ecology to interrogate which lives are considered grievable and which ones are not in conservation landscapes. It focuses on two vignettes of violent human-carnivore interactions in Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda

Presentation long abstract

Accounts of conservation conflicts often reveal that people living around protected areas feel like their lives are less valued than animals' lives —they are confined to ‘less-than-human geographies’. Recent literature on necropolitical ecology illustrates how such geographies were created and maintained by the state, which holds the power to decide over life and death in and around conservation areas. This paper integrates Judith Butler's politics of mourning into necropolitical ecology to interrogate which lives are considered grievable and which ones are not in conservation landscapes. It focuses on two vignettes of violent human-carnivore interactions in Queen Elizabeth National Park, western Uganda: the poisoning of allegedly 11 (but actually three) lions and the killing of a baby girl by a leopard. Both incidents happened in the park's condoned fishing villages, where historically marginalised Basongora pastoralists have been confined to live since the park's creation. We examine how the lost lives —of humans and animals— are publicly mourned and which lives are actually considered lost. We show how the politics of mourning in violent human-wildlife encounters goes beyond the (colonial-)state; rather, the unequal distribution of precarity is entrenched by a range of public authorities (e.g., (social) media, (I)NGOs, and politicians). This is, in part, because sovereignty in conservation territories has become transnationalised as post-colonial states allow international NGOs to carve out their own zones of influence. This coloniality of power influences human-carnivore relations and reifies racialised conservation spaces as less-than-human geographies.

Presentation short abstract

The paper traces K-9 anti-poaching units as necropolitical infrastructure in African conservation. It examines how dogs function as racialized technologies of death-making—revealing necropower's multispecies entanglements in postcolonial landscapes.

Presentation long abstract

In African conservation landscapes, K-9 anti-poaching units operate as necropolitical infrastructure—materially deciding who may move, who will be tracked, and who risks lethal encounter in protected areas. This paper examines how dogs function as instruments of racialized death-making, extending Mbembe's necropolitics into multispecies terrain to analyze conservation's "work of death." Drawing on critical carceral geography, political ecology, and Black studies, I trace the genealogy of conservation's police dogs back to colonial tracking hounds deployed to capture enslaved Africans and enforce apartheid's racial boundaries. These canine lineages reveal necropower's long durée: dogs do not merely assist in policing—they are technologies of necropower. Their teeth, speed, and scent-tracking capacities are conscripted into state practices that subjugate life to the power of death. Conservation's K-9 units also reveal necropolitics' multispecies entanglements. Anti-poaching dogs kill certain wildlife (through stress, chase, injury) while protecting other wildlife; they enforce boundaries determining which animal deaths matter and which human lives are expendable. Handlers describe dogs as "weapons" and "detection systems," yet simultaneously as loyal partners—an affective economy obscuring how both dogs and targets are caught within overlapping regimes of necropower. This analysis contributes to political ecology's engagement with necropolitics by foregrounding how death-making operates through inherited colonial infrastructures that are simultaneously biological, technological, and racial. Examining conservation's multispecies necropolitical assemblages reveals what Mbembe illuminates that biopolitics obscures: the postcolony's active geographies of racialized killing, where "politics is the work of death" enacted through scent, fear, and bodily subjugation.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation traces the use of necropolitical ecologies across Scottish rewilding. I explore framings of the ecological deathscape, the necrobiome as a pathway to ecological abundance, and social erasure within rewilding’s necropolitical turn.

Presentation long abstract

In this presentation, I apply a necropolitical framework to examine how prominent rewilding groups in rural Scotland are actively producing encounters with death in the landscape, focusing both on practices of memorialisation and the concept of the necrobiome. The first strand concerns framings of rewilding as a pathway to restore ‘life’ to a landscape which is haunted by the spectral "absence–presence" of familiar species (Bersaglio & Margulies, 2022). I will explore how necropolitics are evoked within rewilding campaigns to locate haunting within industrial agri-food systems and their “necropolitical technology” of death (Sneegas, 2022 p.65). These spectral landscape framings, and spatial markers of memorialisation, support Walter’s (2019) ‘pervasive dead’ as the renewed integration of non-human death in the everyday. As an extension of this pervasive (eco)dead, I present the rising interest in necrobiome rewilding, which emphasises the nutrient and habitat value of deadwood and deer carcasses left in-situ. Whilst the necrobiome may be viewed as a form of anti-necropolitics (Strange, 2024), where ecological death signals a pathway to re-birth, these practices have simultaneously prompted discomfort regarding public encounters with carcasses. I position the necrobiome as a new iteration of the deathscape, where cultural unfamiliarity with decay and new proximities to the dead have prompted planning to (re)negotiate death’s sequestration from society. To close, I will reflect on the use of necropolitics in the context of Clearance and internal colonialism in the Highlands/Gàidhealtachd, whereby framings of the pervasive (eco)dead must take care not to depoliticise biotic loss under rewilding’s necropolitical turn.

Presentation short abstract

Ongoing fieldwork in the Azores examines the dairy industry through a multispecies lens, tracing cow–farmer relations, ethical care practices, and life–death dynamics in production.

Presentation long abstract

São Miguel, Azores, 2003. In the middle of a pasture where fifty dairy cows graze. Foucault, Mbembe, and a young ethnographer in Critical Animal Studies observe as the cows approach them, pressing their bodies close.

Eloïse: They are already dead.

Mbembe: Already?

Eloïse: I see their flesh removed, their carcasses leaving the slaughterhouse.

Foucault: I rather see a finely tuned modulation of bodies—an optimization of productive capacities.

Mbembe: Down to the decimal point, and according to the farm’s needs. But first: whom do we encounter? Which ontology is at play? Can we call them livestock? Corpses?

Foucault: Here, I see neither death nor full life. Beyond biopower—although it clearly operates—it is not only about deciding who lives or dies.

Eloïse: Maybe it is about engineering lives that already contain death. These dairy cows, framed by this pastoral beauty, disturb the categories.

Mbembe: Indeed—the ambivalence of “living dead.” When I touch these animals, I encounter a life whose very condition is to be consumed by death.

Foucault: A life structured from the outset toward death.

Eloïse: And I realize my ethnographic subjects are granted life so that they do not rot too soon—

Mbembe: —preserved from putrefaction.

Eloïse: Yes. Salted beginning at the embryonic stage.

Mbembe: A thanacological condition: lives unqualified as life, deaths not quite dead.

Foucault: Beyond farming biopower—toward a necro-pastoral order?

Mbembe: A pastoral death-world indeed.

Eloïse: Between hydrangeas and subtropical jungle. Between sky and soil, life and death. We have much more to think through.

Presentation short abstract

We discuss the implications of extending necropolitics to analysis of human subordination of nonhuman life in PE, and argue that necropolitics' application must fully engage with concepts of postcoloniality, de-humanization, race, and reflexive consciousness that undergird Mbembe’s theory.

Presentation long abstract

Scholars in political ecology have widely engaged with Foucauldian biopolitics to analyze the logics and techniques that shape conservation programs (Biermann and Anderson 2017). Political ecologists have examined how conservation practices order, prioritize, and manage nonhuman life. Several studies have highlighted that interventions to make some species live, however, often entail making, not merely letting, others die. Given these limitations, some political ecologists have turned to Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics (Mbembe, 2005; 2019). Necropolitics theorizes the spatial logics of death-making, including processes of confinement, exclusion, and dispossession (Mbembe, 2003). Political ecologists have drawn on necropolitics to theorize state practices that reconfigure human-nonhuman relationships (Bluwstein and De Rosa, 2024; Margulies, 2019). While this provides an important corrective to center killing and violence in human-nonhuman relationships, several important elements of Mbembe’s framework have been neglected. We discuss the implications of extending necropolitics to analysis of human subordination of nonhuman life, and argue that applications of necropolitics must fully engage with concepts of postcoloniality, de-humanization, race, and reflexive consciousness that undergird Mbembe’s theory. We argue that while the efforts to employ Mbembe’s work in political ecology highlight some of the limits of the concept of biopolitics, we build upon recent critiques of readings of necropolitics within political ecology (Gibson, 2024; Peters et al., 2024) and discuss the consequences of applying necropolitics in ways that ignore the social contexts and processes driving the necessity of Mbembe’s theory.

Presentation short abstract

This paper proposes inheritance as a concept for studying the relational geographies of necropolitics/biopolitics, arguing that it helps clarify the presence of necropolitics within imperial cores. This argument is illustrated via archival research into sites of British biodiversity conservation.

Presentation long abstract

To date, most political ecological work drawing on necropolitics has studied (post)colonial geographies overtly coded by racialised logics, adhering to Achille Mbembe’s original theory of necropolitics as a corrective to the Eurocentric historical geographies of Foucauldian biopolitics. While an analytical emphasis on hitherto marginalised non-European places should be welcomed, care is needed to avoid obscuring the fact that necropolitics also extends into imperial cores. As anticolonial thinkers such as Aimé Césaire have long pointed out, the violent governmentalities designed in colonial peripheries inevitably ‘boomerang’ back to the ‘belly of the beast’. In other words, the spatially relational geographies of necropolitics/biopolitics must be kept in view, though without collapsing the different lived experiences of racialised governance that previous necropolitical work has done much to make visible. In this paper, I argue that recent work theorising ‘inheritance’ provides one useful lens for developing such a spatially relational geography of necropolitics. To ground this argument, I turn to my ongoing research on the politics of biodiversity conservation in Britain. Drawing on diverse archival sources, I present vignettes that document how racialised ‘work[s] of death’ from across the British Empire have seeped into British environments, fetishised into banal entities such as agricultural fertiliser, canal infrastructure, and privatised hunting estates – entities that today are matters of significant environmental concern. This paper thus highlights that biopolitical British conservationists operate within a political ecology of necropolitical inheritance, thereby demonstrating the analytical affordances and ethical potentials of a spatially relational geographical theory of necropolitics/biopolitics in action.

Presentation short abstract

This paper theorizes disaster necropolitics. It shows how the natural–human disaster divide obscures the colonial and political-ecological histories through which disasters naturalize and intensify racialized death, making necropolitical violence appear inevitable.

Presentation long abstract

This paper complicates the distinction between natural and human-made disasters—such as earthquakes versus humanitarian crises or genocides—in order to delineate the concept of disaster necropolitics. I argue that disasters are key sites through which necropolitical power operates precisely by naturalizing its effects, by framing racialized and preventable forms of death as the inevitable consequences of natural events. The first part offers a philosophical history of the distinction between natural and artificial disasters, showing that this binary has long obscured the political conditions that shape the scale and distribution of catastrophe. By complicating this distinction, I demonstrate that so-called natural disasters are always already entangled with the work of biopolitical administration of vulnerability. The second part interrogates the biopolitics of disasters. I argue that the politics of disasters cannot be reduced neither to "disaster capitalism" alone nor to administration of life througjh differential distribution of resources: rather, disasters become moments when racialized death-dealing intensifies and becomes intelligible as nature’s work. Disasters thereby operate as mechanisms for normalizing the exposure of entire populations to premature death; that is, the creation of death-worlds. The final part traces the colonial histories of the production of geographies where vulnerability to disaster is systematically racialized and regionally concentrated. These colonial inheritances underlie the topography of disaster necropolitics, which delineates entire geographies as death-worlds, where the occurrence of disasters and the death of entire population appear normal, and natural. Overall, I argue that disaster necropolitics consists in the naturalization of necropolitical violence itself.

Presentation short abstract

This paper builds on the necropolitical ecology literature and draws on emerging evidence of mass socio-ecological destruction from siege warfare in the 2020–22 Tigray war, and argues that Tigray served as a laboratory for ecocide elsewhere.

Presentation long abstract

The 2020–20 Tigray war in Ethiopia was as much an ecological catastrophe as it was a humanitarian one. The siege, a key feature of this war—to paraphrase Mbembe (2003)—facilitated “the subjugation of life to the power of death.” It cut off lifelines (food, medicine) for civilians, unleashed hunger as a weapon (Teklehaymanot and Birhan, 2025), and contributed to ethnic cleansing and possibly genocide (Ibreck and de Waal 2022). Less visible is the war’s environmental destruction in rural Tigray (TGIC 2025), a region once recognised for agroecological restoration (Aster and Emiru, 2023). Drawing on available evidence of environmental destruction in Tigray (CITG, 2025; Liya et al., 2024) and engaging with necropolitical ecology literature (e.g. Cavanagh and Himmelfarb, 2014), we conduct an autopsy of the deadly socio-ecological effects of siege warfare in Tigray and conclude that siege practices enabled the violent, systematic destruction of lives and landscapes. Considering Mbembe and Sarr’s (2023) claim that “Africa is the place where part of the planet’s future is currently playing itself out,” we also deliberate whether the Tigrayan case served as a “laboratory” for subsequent siege warfare (Teklehaymanot, 2025), not only enforcing crimes against humanity (in this “new age of genocide,” see Shaw, 2025) but also enabling ecocide elsewhere (El Fasher, Gaza, Ukraine). Driven by domestic and regional military coalitions and international arms suppliers, the war condemned Tigray to a dystopian trajectory that renders an emancipatory future difficult to imagine (Bluwstein and De Rosa, 2024) without transitional justice accounting for both human and ecological losses.

Presentation short abstract

"Militarism, pacifism, environmentalism" This paper explores the processes of militarization from the perspective of necropolitical ecology, from the nuclear tests in Semipalatinsk and Mururoa to the resistance in Vieques, Okinawa, the Niger Delta, Greenham Commons and the Bialowieza Forest. .

Presentation long abstract

"Militarism, pacifism, environmentalism - drawing on the EJAtlas"

Abstract

This article explores the processes of militarization from the perspective of necropolitical ecology, which analyzes how military and state power determine who lives and who dies, both among humans and among other species. Through about twenty cases recorded in the EJAtlas, socio-environmental transformations associated with militarization from the late 1980s to today are examined, from the nuclear tests in Semipalatinsk (Kazakhstan) and Mururoa to the conflicts and resistance movements in Vieques, Okinawa, Guam and Marshall islands, the Niger Delta, Greenham Common and the Bialowieza Forest. These experiences show that wars, military bases, and extractive projects are articulated within a common logic of structural violence and ecological destruction, where territorial control and pollution are instruments of domination. In response, the article highlights really existing and well documented ecofeminist, pacifist, and environmental justice resistance movements as alternatives that articulate the defense of life and peace in this new "age of empires", an increasingly militarized world.