Necropolitics Covered

Loyd, J. M. (2009) ‘“A Microscopic Insurgent”: Militarization, Health, and Critical Geographies of Violence’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 99(5), pp. 863–873. doi: 10.1080/00045600903253478. Abstract: Wars do not maim with bullets and bombs alone but cause economic and environmental destruction that leave enduring bodily harms. Preparations for war-making also cause negative health effects, from toxic waste to the redirection of social wealth from investment in social needs. The commonsense juxtaposition of exceptional war to normal peace makes it difficult to recognize processes of militarization, the violent continuities between war and peace, and geographic ties binding spaces of relative health with spaces of harms. This article advances a critical geographic analysis of violence to analyze the ways in which militarization and structural violence reinforce one another. A 2007 cholera epidemic in Iraq was militarized through material and discursive geographies of cholera and violence. Humanitarian claims to cure cholera rested on this dualistic geopolitical imagination, distorting the agents of violence and erasing the grave effects of peacetime and wartime structural violence. By situating cholera within a broader historical and geographic context that shows links between “wartime” and “peacetime” places also suffering premature deaths from the destruction or abandonment of necessary infrastructures, a critical human geography can contribute to struggles for peace and justice. 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

Souza Prado, G. A. (2020) ‘Coloniality and perspectivism in psychology: from damnation to ecosophical care relations’, International Review of Psychiatry, 32(4), pp. 320–326. doi: 10.1080/09540261.2020.1765747. Abstract: Inspired by Amerindian peoples’ philosophy, this article aims to problematise the modern philosophical anthropology that underlies psychology as a social practice, and to use the Amerindian perspectivist philosophy proposed by Viveiros de Castro as a critique of Western values. Thus, we approach some of coloniality’s epistemological implications in the institution of subject-object and nature-culture separations that grounds psychology. On the one hand, there is a totalising unification, which operates alongside a transcendental subject that subjugates its object. Beginning from nature’s homogeneity, the differentiation and hierarchy of each being depends on its representations or its soul, expressed as a people’s culture or as an individual psychology. This spiritual-representational aspect is the very foundation of the colonialism and racism of damnation, and their purpose in perpetuating the miserable ways of life of those considered to be scum. On the other hand, in Amerindian cosmogony, humanity is a pronominal mode, a non-exclusive perspectivist position of mankind, built in each context of relations. It is based on this idea that we posit other bases and a new agenda for psychology as a social practice which can enable us to broaden our ways of living towards ecosophical care, as a way of resistance to coloniality. 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

Reid, J. (2010) ‘The Biopoliticization of Humanitarianism: From Saving Bare Life to Securing the Biohuman in Post-Interventionary Societies’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 4(4), pp. 391–411. doi: 10.1080/17502971003700985. Abstract: This article develops an analysis of a partial, albeit I argue very powerful, strand of contemporary humanitarianism. In analyzing an interdisciplinary literature combining theoretical and practice-based perspectives on humanitarianism, I trace the development of a shift in interest from classical humanitarian concerns for the saving of bare life of humanity to the securing of the biohuman. In the development of humanitarianism post-1989, concepts and theories of adaptation, deriving heavily from innovations in the life sciences, are being applied to determine why some societies are supposedly more prone to humanitarian disasters than others in the form of ‘adaptive failures’: how such societies can avert disasters from occurring in the forms of ‘adaptive responses’, as well as how they can recover from them when they do occur by learning ‘adaptive behaviors’. Theories of adaptation and other concepts relating to the evolutionary powers of the biohuman such as ‘information exchange’ and ‘resilience’ are also being applied to conceive the frameworks in which responses to disasters can best be organized. Within the domains and practices of humanitarianism a biologized conception of the human conceived in terms of evolutionary capacities and properties, and the idea of being able to deliver humanity from its various forms of insecurity through its promotion, has taken hold. The humanitarian emergency, as this article details, is today conceived as the primary locale for the transformation of ungovernable peoples into governable populations. Emergencies represent sites of global danger and disorder vested with renewed political significance because they occur where life is said not only to have failed to perform its adaptive functions in securing itself, but where the very failure of life to adapt is construed as a threat to the security of world order. Thus the failure of maladapted populations is said to threaten not only themselves, but the biopolitical foundations of global governance since their suffering produces economic dislocation as well potentially of political violence. Thus they become subject to the strategies of intervention through which global governance seeks to make populations more fit for liberal rule. 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

Zembylas, M. (2024) ‘Racism, white supremacy and Roberto Esposito’s biopolitics through the lens of Black affect studies: Implications for an affirmative educational biopolitics’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 56(4), pp. 358–370. doi: 10.1080/00131857.2023.2229552. Abstract: The objective of this article is to engage in a critical review of Roberto Esposito’s biopolitical account by including a thoroughgoing interrogation of racism and white supremacy through the lens of Black affect studies. It is argued that both white supremacy studies and Esposito’s framework could work side-by-side in ways that are productive for affirmative educational biopolitics. In particular, the analysis highlights two insights: first, engagement with white supremacy as a biopolitical category—in particular, white supremacy as an affective embodiment—is essential for the ability of education to interrogate the racialization of Black bodies; and, second, attentiveness to Black affect in biopolitical accounts is crucial for the decentering of white supremacy in education. These insights broaden the conceptual parameters of educational biopolitics by foregrounding the affective biopower of racism and white supremacy as central to affirmative educational biopolitics. 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

Pugliese, J. (2011) ‘The Reckoning of Possibles: Asylum Seekers, Justice and the Indigenisation of the Levinasian Third’, Australian Feminist Law Journal, 34(1), pp. 23–42. doi: 10.1080/13200968.2011.10854451. Abstract: In this essay, I focus on the death of an asylum seeker, Josefa Rauluni, at Villawood immigration detention centre, in order to address a series of critical questions concerning ethics, justice and non-negotiable responsibility. I contextualise this constellation of questions within a Levinasian framework of ethics as a first philosophy in order to suggest what needs to be done. I conclude the essay by transposing Levinas’ concept of the third, as the arbiter of justice that transcends the limitations of the self-other relation, to an Australian context preoccupied with the topics of refugees, hospitality, justice, ongoing colonial relations of power and Aboriginal sovereignty 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