Presentation short abstract

The paper traces K-9 anti-poaching units as necropolitical infrastructure in African conservation. It examines how dogs function as racialized technologies of death-making—revealing necropower's multispecies entanglements in postcolonial landscapes.

Presentation long abstract

In African conservation landscapes, K-9 anti-poaching units operate as necropolitical infrastructure—materially deciding who may move, who will be tracked, and who risks lethal encounter in protected areas. This paper examines how dogs function as instruments of racialized death-making, extending Mbembe's necropolitics into multispecies terrain to analyze conservation's "work of death." Drawing on critical carceral geography, political ecology, and Black studies, I trace the genealogy of conservation's police dogs back to colonial tracking hounds deployed to capture enslaved Africans and enforce apartheid's racial boundaries. These canine lineages reveal necropower's long durée: dogs do not merely assist in policing—they are technologies of necropower. Their teeth, speed, and scent-tracking capacities are conscripted into state practices that subjugate life to the power of death. Conservation's K-9 units also reveal necropolitics' multispecies entanglements. Anti-poaching dogs kill certain wildlife (through stress, chase, injury) while protecting other wildlife; they enforce boundaries determining which animal deaths matter and which human lives are expendable. Handlers describe dogs as "weapons" and "detection systems," yet simultaneously as loyal partners—an affective economy obscuring how both dogs and targets are caught within overlapping regimes of necropower. This analysis contributes to political ecology's engagement with necropolitics by foregrounding how death-making operates through inherited colonial infrastructures that are simultaneously biological, technological, and racial. Examining conservation's multispecies necropolitical assemblages reveals what Mbembe illuminates that biopolitics obscures: the postcolony's active geographies of racialized killing, where "politics is the work of death" enacted through scent, fear, and bodily subjugation.