Presentation short abstract

The green transition often extends rather than breaks with extractivism, reproducing necropolitical logics through new sacrifice zones. Using rare earths as a lens, we show how these dynamics generate death-worlds and call for confronting the necropolitical foundations of the green transition.

Presentation long abstract

The green transition is increasingly celebrated as an inevitable pathway out of the climate crisis, yet its political ecologies remain deeply entangled with the necropolitical logics that structure contemporary capitalism. To critically examine these overlooked harms, we reintroduce necroecology as a framework to reveal how both fossil and green capitalism, through extractivist logics and geopolitical rivalries, generate systemic socio-ecological destruction and sacrifice. Rather than a rupture with extractivism, the transition often extends necropolitical power by relocating sites of violence, expanding sacrifice zones, and intensifying asymmetrical dependencies on rare earths and critical minerals.

We identify three mechanisms through which necroecological power is reproduced:

(1) Extractive necropolitics, where labour, land, and nonhuman life are rendered expendable through intensified resource frontiers;

(2) Environcide, the slow and accelerated destruction of ecosystems through mining, militarised securitisation and green territorialisation;

(3) Geopolitical necrometabolism, in which the restructuring of material and energetic flows reconfigures imperial asymmetries and produces new geographies of exploitation.

Using the rare earth supply chain as an empirical entry point, we show how these processes converge in the production of planetary death-worlds that undermine both ecological and social reproduction. We argue that political ecology must confront the necropolitical foundations of the green transition and identify counter-practices that resist the normalisation of death and sacrifice.