Format/Structure

The intended format is a traditional paper presentation session.

Long Abstract

In this proposed session, we welcome papers related to present currents and critiques of political ecology's engagements with Achille Mbembe's theory of necropolitics. Necropolitics, the “…contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death” (Mbembe, 2005: 39), powerfully shows how politics becomes "the work of death" (Ibid., pg. 16). Necropolitics is a welcome antidote to Foucault's theory of biopolitics and its relatively anemic approach to race, the postcolony, and active geographies of death-making practices ranging from overt-geographies of violent confinement and killing such as in Palestine, to the spatial logics of the plantation and its ghostly afterlives (Mbembe, 2003). Necropolitics has quickly emerged as a powerful analytical theory embraced by political ecologists examining subjects ranging from spaces of killing in postcolonial landscapes (Cavanaugh and Himmelfarb, 2015), to climate change (deBoom, 2015), to state practices reconfiguring human relations with ecologies and nonhuman life (Adolfi and Fleishmann, 2024; Bluwstein and De Rosa, 2024; Margulies, 2019).

More recently, several critiques have questioned and raised concerns about the theoretical reading of Mbembe's necropolitics within political ecology (Gibson, 2024; Peters et al., 2024), as well as the political and theoretical consequences of a necropolitical turn away from historically more popular engagements with Foucauldian biopolitics and what might be pursued otherwise as a kind of 'anti-necropolitics' (Strange, 2024). With an openness to critique, generous dialogue, and debate in mind, our session proposes to develop a timely discussion around the (mis)uses of necropolitics in political ecology, welcoming both empirically-driven papers that productively engage with necropolitics as framework and mode of analysis, as well as more theoretically-oriented works that critique or demonstrated the place of necropolitical theory in political ecology today.

This Panel has 15 pending paper proposals.
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