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.