Necrogeopolitics: On Death and Death-Making in International Relations

Description

Necrogeopolitics: On Death and Death-Making in International Relations brings together a diverse array of critical IR scholars, political theorists, critical security studies researchers, and critical geographers to provide a series of interventions on the topic of death and death-making in global politics. Contrary to most existing scholarship, this volume does not place the emphasis on traditional sources or large-scale configurations of power/force leading to death in IR. Instead, it details, theorizes, and challenges more mundane, perhaps banal, and often ordinary modalities of violence perpetrated against human lives and bodies, and often contributing to horrific instances of death and destruction. Concepts such as "slow death," "soft killing," "superfluous bodies," or "extra/ordinary" destruction/disappearance are brought to the fore by prominent voices in these fields alongside more junior creative thinkers to rethink the politics of life and death in the global polity away from dominant IR or political theory paradigms about power, force, and violence. The volume features chapters that offer thought-provoking reconsiderations of key concepts, theories, and practices about death and death-making along with other chapters that seek to challenge some of these concepts, theories, or practices in settings that include the Palestinian territories, Brazilian cities, displaced population flows from the Middle East, sites of immigration policing in North America, and spaces of welfare politics in Scandinavian states. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: Necrogeopolitics and death-making Rethinking necropolitics and biopolitics Necropolitics and international relations Necrogeopolitics and ordinary death-making Outline of the book Notes Bibliography 1. Not a state of exception: Weak state killing as a mode of neoliberal governmentality Introduction Sovereignty, biopower, racism Mbembe’s assessment of biopower Is necropolitics really about sovereign power? The spatio-temporality of neoliberalism: Povinelli, Cacho, and Wacquant Conclusion Notes Bibliography 2. Political incompetence and death-making: An outline of unsuitable governance Introduction Biopolitical reason and affective politics Alexis de Tocqueville and George Orwell: on ignorance and incompetence in the colony The violence of austerity: incompetence and its slow deaths Conclusion Notes Bibliography 3. On the loss of death: Necropolitics in the study of genocide Introduction On social death Biopolitics and the plasticity of life Genocide and the problem of death Conclusion Notes Bibliography 4. The violent management of peace and beauty in Rio de Janeiro Introduction Making sense of life The reproduction of social life in Rio de Janeiro Favelas do not fit on the map Beautification and securitization Conclusion: the democratization of beautiful forms of life Notes Bibliography 5. The necrogeopolitics of Danish welfare and the horror of responsibility Introduction The Danish national Thing The racism of Danish freedom fantasies Denmark in the world The trauma of responsibility Notes Bibliography 6. “Death in this country is normal”: Quiet deaths in the Global South Introduction Counting the dead: mortality rates and global health in “Africa” Constructing health crises: the discourse on Ebola The politics of wailing: some conclusions Notes Bibliography 7. Cinematic encounters and frontiers of precarity Prologue: on deniability Ethical driftings: genres and genres of man The grammar of borders: Diego Quemada-Díez’s The Golden Dream Cinematic borderscapes Conclusion Notes Bibliography 8. The kill zone: Choreographies of life at the limits of a death-world The “more-than-human geopolitics” of siege warfare Technologies of movement and the construction of besieged subjects The invisible line Liminality Counter-choreographies Notes Bibliography 9. Specters of schmaltz: Aesthetics, death, and the haunting of communist kitsch Introduction Aesthetics and kitsch On kitsch Hauntology and kitsch The intersection of kitsch and death Conclusion Notes Bibliography 10. The earth’s dying body: On the necroeconomy of planetary collapse Introduction First vignette: unnatural histories Second vignette: the political necroeconomy of nature Third vignette: telling stories while we wait Notes Bibliography Afterword: Afterlife, afterdeath Notes Bibliography Index