Shams, F. (2020). Dialogues with the Dead: Necropoetics of Zahra’s Paradise. Iranian Studies, 53(5–6), 893–909. https://doi.org/10.1080/00210862.2019.1689809

What can the poetry chosen for epitaphs on graves tell us about the political and cultural development of post-revolutionary Iran and the politics of death and dying under the Islamic Republic? This article explores contemporary Persian epitaph poetry as a valuable medium for understanding the socio-political dynamics of Iranian society. By analyzing the epitaphs of the Iran–Iraq war martyrs, who are buried in Zahra’s Paradise public cemetery in Tehran (Behesht-e Zahra), a new nomenclature can be established for the religious, political and socio-cultural ideas underpinning death and the afterlife.

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Neville-Shepard, M. (2023) ‘“Better never means better for everyone”: White feminist necropolitics and Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 109(1), pp. 2–25. doi: 10.1080/00335630.2022.2136738.

This article builds on those who have critiqued Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale along racial lines and calls into question the esteemed status the show holds as a rhetorical resource for contemporary feminist activism. By drawing attention to the parasitical relationship that the archetype of the vulnerable (but resilient) white woman has to Black pain and death, I argue that the series further calcifies the dominance of white feminism, enacting what I term “white feminist necropolitics.” To illuminate this theory, the essay presents a close analysis of The Handmaid's Tale. Specifically, I demonstrate how the show deploys post-racial logics to center a white feminist heroine whose story of saviorism relies on the cooptation of Black pain and the exploitation of Black death. Ultimately, this critical reading of the series points to the ways in which white feminism and necropolitics are intricately entangled.

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Gregory, D., 2005. Splintering Palestine. B/ordering Space, pp.123-37. Excerpt: Topographies of Terror. Ever since 11 September 2001, the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon has taken advantage of President George W. Bush's `war on terrorism' to ratchet up the colonial dispossession of the Palestinian people (Mansour, 2002; Gregory, 2003). It has done so by seeking to establish an identity between the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington and the increasingly militarized Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation of what remains.of Palestine: Gaza and the West Bank. As a result `terrorism' has been made polymorphous. Without defined shape or determinate roots, its mantle can be cast over any form of resistance to sovereign power. This has allowed the Sharon regime to advance its colonial project not through appeals to Zionism alone, to the Messianic mission of `redeeming' the biblical heartlands of Judea and Samaria, but also - crucially for its international constituency - as another front in a generalized `war on terrorism'. This has in turn sustained the neoconservative deception that political violence can somehow be ended without reference to the historico-geographical conditions that frame it. Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's repeated, racist insistence that `the root cause of terrorism lies not in grievance but in a disposition toward unbridled violence' has been reaffirmed by both the Bush and Sharon administrations. It conveniently exempts their own actions from scrutiny and absolves them of anything other than a restless, roving military response (Netanyahu, 1986)

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Lopez Oggier, F. (2026). Itinerant deathworlds: Spanish border externalisation and the necroborder. Territory, Politics, Governance, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2025.2594500

Abstract: In 2006 Spain spearheaded European border externalisation, re-spatialising its border into a peripatetic political institution to systematically intercept ‘irregular’ migrants. This paper conducts a necropolitical analysis of Spain’s border externalisation projects by reviewing migrant mortality/disappearance data and conducting a discourse analysis of first-hand migrant accounts with the dislocated bordering apparatus. I posit that Spain’s border externalisation efforts create ‘itinerant deathworlds’: a dislocated form of necropower that follows migrants while they are in transit. Post-mortem violence and psychic trauma cause itinerant deathworlds to linger long after migration journeys have ended, projecting them into indeterminate spatio-temporal scales.

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Palombo, L., 2007. Whose turn is it? White diasporic and transnational practices and the necropolitics of the plantation and internment camps. Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, 3.

Abstract: The bordering of the Plantation Camps of the 1860s and Internment Camps of World War One (WW1) through the racialised biopolitical and necropolitical relations of the state of exception have controlled local shifts from the position of non-white and white ‘objects of labour’ to ‘political subjects’ or citizens of the nation. The borders of the Camps are violent colonial techniques that re-affirm an anglophilic form of white diasporic and transnational power. This process of instituting borders of control “outside the law” has operated to strengthen white anglophilic sovereignty and its participation and embeddedness in a “global” colonial project. These camps became permanent “exceptional”1 spatial arrangements that diversified but also continued the effects of the dislocation of Indigenous Australians. These camps continued the violent mechanisms that attempted to control Indigenous people’s “life and death” and that in Mbembe’s words have “civilize[d]” them as providers of free labour (see Perera 2002: para 11; Mbembe 2003: 14

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Khoshneviss, H. (2024) ‘State of Exception, Necropolitics, and Puerto Rico: Naturalizing Disaster and Naturalizing Difference’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 35(1), pp. 75–89. doi: 10.1080/10455752.2023.2279957. Abstract: Right after Hurricane Irma hit Puerto Rico and Florida, Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico in September 2017. Around the same time Harvey hit Texas. The vast difference in the treatment of Puerto Rico as a US territory, compared to Florida and Texas on the “mainland,” sparked conversations about the location of Puerto Rico in the US imagination and policies. The media coverage of the disaster and the statements from officials made it clear that while certain populations are protected and saved, certain others are abandoned and “let die.” To provide an explanation for these different treatments, I explore two “naturalizing” processes. First, I show how the historical construction of Puerto Ricans as “naturally” inferior disguised their century-long exploitation. Second, I examine how the framing of Hurricane Maria as a “natural” disaster on the one hand concealed historical interventions by the United States in Puerto Rico and on the other hand, ignored how disaster capitalism has caused an increase in the intensity and frequency of disasters. I suggest that state of exception and abandonment are two concepts that can provide an explanation about how these converging processes have made disasters the norm in the colony, rather than an anomaly.

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Citation: Osuri, G. (2009) ‘Necropolitical complicities: (re)constructing a normative somatechnics of Iraq’, Social Semiotics, 19(1), pp. 31–45. doi: 10.1080/10350330802632766.

Abstract: This article theorizes the concept of necropolitical complicities in the construction and writing of ethno-sectarian identities in the context of the war in Iraq. Drawing on Mbembe's concept of necropolitics in relation to the (re)construction of a normative somatechnics, the article argues for an acknowledgment of operative colonial epistemologies and techniques of governance that have fuelled contemporary sectarian violence in Iraq. The interplay between these epistemologies and techniques of governance and the violent assertions of Iraqi ethno-religious identities are theorized as necropolitical complicities.

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Abstract: The Holocaust left behind countless bodies – bodies dispersed across the execution sites, former Nazi camps, repurposed Jewish cemeteries; bodies hastily buried at the outskirts of the former shtetls and in the forest. This article traces the early postwar attempts by various actors to respond to the material (omni)presence of dead bodies. It engages with endeavors by Jewish survivors to exhume and rebury human remains of the victims of the Holocaust, but also with practices instantiating and perpetuating their dehumanization: the mutilation and robbery of the dead by the local non-Jewish populace and their neglect by the state

Citation: Dziuban, Z. (2025) ‘Discordant necropolitics: survivor-led exhumations and violence against the dead in the early post-Holocaust Poland’, Holocaust Studies, 31(3), pp. 421–443. doi: 10.1080/17504902.2024.2392317.

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Morgensen, S. L. (2011) ‘The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now’, Settler Colonial Studies, 1(1), pp. 52–76. doi: 10.1080/2201473X.2011.10648801.

Abstract: Settler colonialism is exemplary of the processes of biopower theorised by Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. However, settler colonialism remains naturalised within theories of biopower and theories of its relation to coloniality. White supremacist settler colonisation produces specific modes of biopolitics that sustain not only in settler states but also in regimes of global governance that inherit, extend, and naturalise their power. I extend Patrick Wolfe’s theory that a ‘logic of elimination’ constitutes settler colonialism in the genocide and amalgamation of Indigenous peoples, by indicating that this also indigenises and naturalises white settler nations as projections of the West. Agamben’s work illuminates how Indigenous peoples are eliminated in a state of exception to Western law, which by functioning to erase consanguinity – as the patriarch in Roman law eliminates the defiant son - explains Indigenous peoples’ seemingly contradictory incorporation within and excision from the body of white settler nations. This biopolitical process specific to settler colonialism also structures the manner in which white settler societies demonstrably universalize Western law, both within their bounds and in global arenas. My call to denaturalise settler colonialism in social theory is but a first step towards broader study of how the biopolitics of settler colonialism structure current modes of biopower and require concerted critique at the intersections of Indigenous and settler colonial studies.

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This is Necropolitics Covered. A mini audio series covering literature on necropolitics one abstract at a time.

My name is Liv Roe. I'm a former elected member of the New Zealand local government, with a Master's in Political Science from Victoria University of Wellington, where my dissertation focused on necropolitics.

While doing my post-grad research, I noticed that not a lot of people around me, even the politically savvy, haven’t even heard about it. I supposed it might have something to do with the fact that compared to many political theories that are centuries old, Achille Mbembe's concept of necropolitics was relatively young, only emerging in the early 2000’s.

So, in this series I aim to address that gap in knowledge, particularly for people who are interested in learning about necropolitics. Together, we are going to cover the existing body of literature about or relating to the topic of necropolitics by reading through the abstracts, summaries, or excerpts of academic papers from different sectors and industries all over the world.

Unfortunately, this is probably not going to be the kind of short-form content that is going to summarise and simplify everything for you. We are only going through the basics of these papers to hopefully encourage you to find their full pieces to read and get into for yourselves. We have become way too used to just consuming a few minutes of bite-sized information during our scroll and then repeating the same talking points to others without further in-depth reading and reflection.

Citations for these sources are always provided. So listen through, get to reading, get to thinking, and get to taking some action.

Necropolitics Covered episodes are available on Apple Podcasts. You can also find inks, PDF downloadables, and other bonus stuff on Substack: necropolitics.substack.com. And if you would like to get in touch, send me an email on [email protected].

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com