This book discusses and theorizes Achille Mbembe's necropolitics, the politics of death, in the specific context of North America. It works to characterize and analyze the particularities and relational differences of American and Canadian necropowers vis-à-vis their devices, subjectivities, necroempowered subjects, and production of spaces of death in their geographical and symbolic borderlands with the Third World: the US-Mexico border, indigenous lands, migrant and Black-American neighborhoods, and resource rich geographies. North American necropowers not only profit from death, but also conduct disposable populations to death throughout the region. The volume proposes a postcolonial perspective that characterizes the political power of North America as a necropower-or the sovereign power to make die. Each chapter therefore theorizes and analyzes the specificities of necropower, examining different necropolitics that range from asylum and migration restrictions to the economic exploitation and abandonment of deprived populations and policing of ethnic minorities, in particular Mexican immigrants, indigenous peoples, and African Am erican communities. Ariadna Estévez is Professor at the Centre for Research on North America of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She teaches human rights, forced migration, and biopolitical and necropolitical research methodologies at UNAM's Faculty of Political and Social Sciences; human rights critical perspectives at the Instituto de Estudios Críticos 17; and human rights from a feminist perspective at the Instituto Simone de Beauvoir. She is the author of Necropolitical Wars and Asylum Biopolitics in North America (2018) and Human Rights, Migration and Social Conflict: Towards a Decolonized Global Justice (2012).

This book discusses and theorizes Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, the politics of death, in the specific context of North America. It works to characterize and analyze the particularities and relational differences of American and Canadian necropowers vis-à-vis their devices, subjectivities, necroempowered subjects, and production of spaces of death in their geographical and symbolic borderlands with the Third World: the US-Mexico border, indigenous lands, migrant and Black-American ​neighborhoods, and resource rich geographies. North American necropowers not only profit from death, but also conduct disposable populations to death throughout the region. The volume proposes a postcolonial perspective that characterizes the political power of North America as a necropower—or the sovereign power to make die. Each chapter therefore theorizes and analyzes the specificities of necropower, examining different necropolitics that range from asylum and migration restrictions to the economic exploitation and abandonment of deprived populations and policing of ethnic minorities, in particular Mexican immigrants, indigenous peoples, and African Am​erican communities.

Using examples from the United States—Mexico border, Central America, and South America, this book argues that forced migration is not a spontaneous phenomenon, but rather a product of necropolitical strategies designed to depopulate resource rich countries or regions. Estevez merges necropolitical analysis with postcolonial migration and offers a new framework to study the set of policies, laws, institutions, and political discourses producing a profit in a legal context in which habitat devastation is legal, but mobility is a crime. Violence, deprivation of food or water, environmental contamination, and rights exclusion are some of the tactics used in extractivist capitalism. Private and state actors alike, use necropower, both its first and third world versions, to make people, living and dead, a commodity.

In Necropolitics Achille Mbembe, a leader in the new wave of francophone critical theory, theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world, a world plagued by ever-increasing inequality, militarization, enmity, and terror as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces determined to exclude and kill. He outlines how democracy has begun to embrace its dark side---what he calls its “nocturnal body”---which is based on the desires, fears, affects, relations, and violence that drove colonialism. This shift has hollowed out democracy, thereby eroding the very values, rights, and freedoms liberal democracy routinely celebrates. As a result, war has become the sacrament of our times in a conception of sovereignty that operates by annihilating all those considered enemies of the state. Despite his dire diagnosis, Mbembe draws on post-Foucauldian debates on biopolitics, war, and race as well as Fanon's notion of care as a shared vulnerability to explore how new conceptions of the human that transcend humanism might come to pass. These new conceptions would allow us to encounter the Other not as a thing to exclude but as a person with whom to build a more just world.

This book offers a contemporary look at violence in Mexico and argues for a recalibration in how necropolitics, as the administration of life and death, is understood. The author locates the forces of mortality directly on the body, rather than as an object of government, thereby placing death in a politics of the everyday. This necropolitics is explored through testimonies of individuals living in towns overrun by organized crime and resistance groups, namely, the autodefensa movement, that operate throughout Michoacán, one of the most violent states in Mexico. This volume studies how individuals and communities go on living not in spite of the death that surrounds life, but more disturbingly by attuning to it.

This book investigates the contested phenomena of Islamophobia, exploring the dichotomous relationship that exists between Islamophobia as a political concept and Islamophobia as a ‘real’ and tangible discriminatory phenomenon. In doing so, this book improves understanding about Islamophobia through arguing how this dichotomous contestation serves a number of functions. To do so, Allen radically reframes and reconfigures existing notions and understandings of Islamophobia. It does so in two ways. First, through presenting empirical data gathered from more than 100 victims of Islamophobic hate crime to categorically evidence that Islamophobia is indeed real and tangible. Second, through unrivalled ‘insider’ experience gained as an independent adviser on Islamophobia and associated issues to various political, community and third sector stakeholders. Challenging existing scholarly conceptions of Islamophobia, this book also challenges politicians and policymakers to do more.

The violence wrought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly. Using the innovative concept of "slow violence" to describe these threats, Rob Nixon focuses on the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many environmental crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today. Slow violence, because it is so readily ignored by a hard-charging capitalism, exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems and of people who are poor, disempowered, and often involuntarily displaced, while fueling social conflicts that arise from desperation as life-sustaining conditions erode. In a book of extraordinary scope, Nixon examines a cluster of writer-activists affiliated with the environmentalism of the poor in the global South. By approaching environmental justice literature from this transnational perspective, he exposes the limitations of the national and local frames that dominate environmental writing. And by skillfully illuminating the strategies these writer-activists deploy to give dramatic visibility to environmental emergencies, Nixon invites his readers to engage with some of the most pressing challenges of our time.