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.