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Presentation short abstract

Based on qualitative research, this paper examines how extractivist biopolitics may shift into necropolitics through the criminalisation of dissidence and geopolitics of knowledge, exploring what this means for rethinking life, death, and resistance from decolonial feminist perspectives within PE.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how extractivist governance in the Peruvian Andes regulates bodies and territories in socio-ecological conflicts. Drawing on interviews with state actors and environmental defenders conducted 2019-2025, it analyses how state mechanisms discipline bodies and territories to secure copper extraction despite local resistance.

Extractivist biopolitics provides a useful framework for understanding how extractivist accumulation is sustained by the criminalisation of dissidence and epistemic violence. Yet, this framework has certain limitations. This article aims to extend biopolitical ecologies with decolonial feminist thought on embodied subjectivities. Focusing on the criminalisation of dissidence and geopolitics of knowledge, as two central mechanisms of extractivist politics, it further examines when and how extractivist biopower becomes necropolitical. These mechanisms expose the disposability of territories, revealing how extractivism governs through both the management and the abandonment of life and embodied subjectivities.

These questions are explored through a qualitative case study of two large-scale copper mines in the southern Andes, where the criminalisation of social protest is a major concern. Here, actors continue to resist extractivist governance through the defence of life against multiple forms of gendered and extractive violence.

By empirically grounding the analysis of extractivist biopolitics and its potential necropolitical turns, this contribution offers new insights into how power operates across the boundaries of life and death in contexts of extractivist conflict. It contributes to current debates on necropolitical ecologies by demonstrating how death-making and resistance are co-constituted in extractive frontiers, highlighting the need to theorise necropolitics from grounded, contested geographies of the Global South.