The article aims to answer the following question: how is it possible that in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, as a series of daily activities were suspended in the name of preserving life, police violence has not only continued but worsened in the United States and in Brazil? We argue that racism structures social relations both in the United States and in Brazil, functioning as an essential activity of states that remain involved in the production of different types of physical and symbolic death even amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. Contrary to mainstream International Relations, which narrates its central categories – such as the state – as neutral and non-racialised, we will draw attention to the racial origin of the state and its institutions, such as the police. This article aims to look at these two contexts, Brazil and the United States, in a crossed way. This analysis is only possible because, despite the heterogeneity of the two scenarios, we understand that racism is constitutive of global order and of the institutions that sustain its unfair and unequal character.

Using the unique and historic Islamic cemetery of Mamillah in Jerusalem as a primary example, this essay discusses the ethno-necrocratic order that led to the 2008 Israeli High Court of Justice's codification of the supremacy of Jewish bodies and afterlives over non-Jewish ones, on the basis of advancing Israel's values. Hundreds of Palestinian burial grounds, starting with village cemeteries, have been destroyed since 1948. Indeed, funerary sites have testified to the omnipresence and millenarian existence of a population that the state has sought to erase from memory. In a few decades, the deathscape was radically altered, in cities as in the countryside. Although real estate corruption plagues Israeli politics, land use planning and real estate capitalism are inseparable from the ethno-racial politics of exclusion, which affect both the dead and the living.

Based on long-term ethnographic research on contemporary exhumations of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), as well as analysis of the exhumation of Francisco Franco from the Valley of the Fallen, this paper looks at the ways in which the dictator’s moral exemplarity has evolved over time since his military victory in 1939. During the early years of his dictatorship, Franco’s propaganda machine built the legend of a historical character touched by divine providence who sacrificed himself to save Spain from communism. His moral charisma was enriched by associating his historical mission with a constellation of moral exemplars drawn from medieval and imperial Spain. After his death, his moral exemplarity dwindled as democratic Spain embraced a political discourse of national reconciliation. Yet, since 2000, a new negative exemplarity of Franco as a war criminal has come into sharp focus, in connection with the exhumation of the mass graves of tens of thousands of Republican civilians executed by his army and paramilitary. In recent years, Franco has reemerged as a fascist exemplar alongside a rise of the extreme right. To understand the revival of his fascist exemplarity, I focus on two processes: the rise of the political party Vox, which claims undisguised admiration for Franco’s legacy (a process I call “neo-exemplarity”), and the dismantling in October 2019 of Franco’s honorable burial and the debate over the treatment that his mortal remains deserve (a process I call “necro-exemplarity”).

This article looks at the challenges that animist materialism offers to reading strategies in new materialist animal studies scholarship. Where Rosi Braidotti’s vitalist materialism calls for a neoliteral, anti-metaphorical mode of relating to animals, Harry Garuba identifies metaphor as a primary feature of animist materialist practice in African material culture. After critiquing Rosi Braidotti’s dismissal of the “old” metaphorical ways of relating to animals, the article offers a reading of animals and the animist code in two southern African novels, Alex La Guma’s Time of the Butcherbird (1979) and Mia Couto’s The Last Flight of the Flamingo (2000), to consider the potential of animist codings of animals for resisting colonial necropolitics. Animist materialism offers the potential to raise animals and humans into ethical status by affirming the very knowledges and worldviews that Cartesian, colonial humanism wrote off as nonsense and as a marker of inhumanity.

This article investigates the works of Dussel, Maldonado-Torres, and Mbembe as representatives of a tendency in the field of decolonial thought to assume the templates of warfare and the camp as the archetypal registers of violence in the contemporary world. Identifying this focus as the remnant of a Eurocentric vocabulary (the paradigm of war), the article proposes a shift from the language of warfare predominant in the field to a language of welfare. The article turns to the gated community (GC), instead of the camp, and the imperatives of (re)creation, instead of the logics of elimination, as new templates with which to make sense of modern/colonial violence. Moving beyond militaristic imagery, the analysis shows a form of violence that emerges as a response to the endless search for a life of convenience inside the walls of the GC. To this end, the article advances the concept of the dialect of disarrangement, the enforced but uneasy encounter between two subjectivities that inhabit the GC: the patrons (the homeowners who consume the easy life) and servants (the racialised service staff). In the GC, violence emerges in attempts to respond to this (in)convenient encounter via misrepresentations of both patrons and servants as out of their place.

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.

Informed by theories of biopolitics and necropolitics, I argue that Christian orthodoxy is a colonial power formation that manufactures the subjectivities of those within the Church and those without. The operation of biopolitics and necropolitics coalesces around two Christian bodies – the local body and the corporate body catholic – and is thus explicable according to the synthetic framework of ‘body politics.’ Within the body-political calculus, orthodox Christians qualify as genuine lives and, consequently, benefit from biopolitical interventions to promote their flourishing; heretics, by contrast, represent (non-)subjects whose bodies orthodoxy/colonialism consigns to destruction. As a case study to illustrate the import of my theoretical analysis for ecclesiological reflection, I examine the rhetoric of the leaders of the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON), who, despite presenting their movement as a decolonial project, espouse a body-political theology and, therefore, remain firmly within the matrix of Christian colonial orthodoxy.

Aggressive policing strategies have come under scrutiny for stark racial and ethnic inequities. New York City, home to the United States’ largest police force, was subject to a federal class action lawsuit that culminated in its “Stop, Question and Frisk” policies being ruled unconstitutional. In this paper we argue that Stop and Frisk not only violates constitutional rights, but also constitutes a public health problem. Operating as one process in the death world, Stop and Frisk transforms urban space from a resource to a source of danger; induces perceptual dysfunctions that stymie possibilities for Black engagement with the state and make blackness a metonym for crime and disorder; depletes economic and civic resources; and is embodied, by imprinting on the Black body, physically and mentally. Taken together this policing practice induces stress, fear and trauma, marks the Black body as the proper target for erasure by those who would restore the moral order of the polity, and sets Black lives on a trajectory of debility. Stop and Frisk, whatever its intent, is a necropolitical project. Though Achille Mbembe defined necropolitics as the sovereign determination of who lives and dies, we argue that necropolitical projects need not produce a dead body immediately to function. We extend Mbembe’s concept to include diffuse, environmental factors that scale up from individual encounters to Black communities. Though Foucault’s widely cited analysis sees the prison as central in the management and regulation of populations, we hold that Stop and Frisk has more in common with necropower than with biopower, producing dysfunctional bodies awaiting death.

The hugely popular proto-Ottoman television serial Resurrection Ertuğrul (Diriliş Ertuğrul, 2014–) is the culmination of a series of attempts by Turkish government broadcaster TRT to produce a historical drama in line with the values of the governing AKP. Far from being confined to the television screen, Resurrection is called upon by the government for multiple extra-textual engagements with the public. This essay traces some of the ways in which the serial has been used instrumentally by the AKP, blurring traditional distinctions between entertainment and official (state sanctioned) history, and intervening in political discourse. It first introduces the notion of prescriptive activation to describe the extra-textual use of media texts by those in power for political ends. Next, it examines the trappings of death that surround Resurrection, suggesting that the serial partakes in a representational necropolitics that fetishizes death for the nation. Finally, it explores the stakes of such representation, turning to a case in which text-inspired and literal necropolitics converge.