Necrogeopolitics On Death and Death-Making in International Relations Interventions Series

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.

Introduction: Necrogeopolitics and death-making; 1. Not a state of exception: Weak state killing as a mode of neoliberal governmentality;2. Political incompetence and death-making: An outline of unsuitable governance;3. On the loss of death: Necropolitics in the study of genocide; 4. The violent management of peace and beauty in Rio de Janeiro; 5. The necrogeopolitics of Danish welfare and the horror of responsibility; 6. "Death in this country is normal": Quiet deaths in the Global South;7. Cinematic encounters and frontiers of precarity;8. The kill zone: Choreographies of life at the limits of a death-world; 9. Specters of schmaltz: Aesthetics, death, and the haunting of communist kitsch; 10. The earth’s dying body: On the necroeconomy of planetary collapse; Afterword: Afterlife, afterdeath

Caroline Alphin is an Instructor in the Department of English at Radford University, USA.

François Debrix is a Professor of Political Science and the Director of the ASPECT (Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought) doctoral program at Virginia Tech, USA.