Covering abstracts and excerpts of academic pieces on necropolitics from all over the world.
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“A Microscopic Insurgent”: Militarization, Health, and Critical Geographies of Violence
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.
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3 Aug 2026
Coloniality and perspectivism in psychology: from damnation to ecosophical care relations
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.
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1 Aug 2026
The Biopoliticization of Humanitarianism: From Saving Bare Life to Securing the Biohuman in Post-Interventionary Societies
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.
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