Abstract
We would like to thank Alexander A. Dunlap for his generous engagement with our article on necropolitics and geography (Peters et al., 2025). His reflections on positionality and the varying intensities and scales of necropolitics resonate strongly with our own concerns. Likewise, we share his conviction that necropolitics cannot be reduced to death alone but must be understood as part of a wider web of slow, fast, and injurious harms, intimately bound to the operations of extractive states and capitalism (Jones, 2023; Puar, 2017). Yet, despite many valid critiques of how conceptually capacious necropolitics has become, as we wrote in our original piece: ‘There is a real danger in underplaying the reality of both death and death-in-life for so many and in this sense it is vital that we do not theorise away the politics from necropolitics’ (Peters et al., 2025: 479).
The ongoing Israeli genocide against Palestinians makes these points urgent and in ways that academic debates alone can never capture. It reveals necropolitics not only as a global force – deeply connected to racism and coloniality, as Mbembe (2003) wrote – but also as something entirely exceeding theory’s reach. The sheer violence, the intensification of colonial projects, and, perhaps most disturbingly, the widespread political acquiescence towards such livestreamed ‘extermination campaigns’ (Dunlap 2025) may mark the limits of any framework’s ability to merely ‘make sense’ of the present. We say merely not because this would be a simple task but instead solely trying to make sense and nothing more feels abdicative at this moment.
Thinking with Dunlap’s (2025) call to emphasise positionality, and writing in the pages of Progress in Human Geography amid an ongoing genocide, we must confront the fact that geographers, too, have not escaped Israel’s necropolitical violence. In January 2024, Professor of Geography, Dr Abdel Nasser Al-Saqqa, was killed by an Israeli air strike that targeted his home in Khan Younis. Chair of the Geography Department at Al-Aqsa University and remembered by geography students as ‘generous and kind’ (Abu Sitta 2024), he became one of at least 95 Professors killed by Israel since October 7, 2023. His death forms part of what the UN (2024) has termed ‘scholasticide’ – the systematic destruction of every Gazan university, the majority of its schools, and countless students.
Even as we were writing these words, the UK government was proscribing and mass-arresting its citizens for resisting genocide, whilst flying surveillance missions over Gaza from its neocolonial base in Cyprus (Declassified 2025); Israeli soldiers were murdering and starving Palestinian civilians as they queued for food; the United States were bankrolling Israel’s AI-assisted war crimes and underwriting its tactics of ‘medieval siege warfare’ (Mbembe, 2003); and yet more Palestinian journalists were killed by Israel, to the near silence of the global press. And these are just the crimes we could see. The ‘invisible killing’ (Mbembe, 2003) continued beneath the rubble of Gaza and will unfold into the future through the slow contamination of soil, water, and bodies. In the face of such horror, at such a scale and at such ‘intensity’ (Dunlap, 2025), perhaps all theories are inevitably bound to feel inadequate?
Yet, it is precisely here that necropolitics, despite its shortcomings, remains urgently useful. It gives us a language to name and connect these violences – to show how they are not exceptional ruptures but, as Dunlap (2025) emphasises, are part of ongoing systems that organise life and death unevenly across the planet. The challenge now is to hold onto the clarity that such theories can provide, whilst also refusing to let theory become a substitute for political urgency, solidarity, and action.
In dialogue with Dunlap (2025), we greatly appreciate his effort to spatialise and extend the ‘necro-everything’ 1 through the idea of the ‘necro-everywhere’. This spatialisation was precisely the intention we had when we started the paper, and Dunlap frames this much more neatly than we managed. And there is no doubt that in the Capitalocene everything and everywhere is (or at least certainly feels) ‘necro’. But as others have argued, it is important to understand this conjuncture as an increasingly carceral and fundamentally racial Capitalocene (see Vergès, 2017; also Simpson and Cheever, 2025), full of variegation and heterogeneity. Or to put this differently, while at one level necropolitics may be ‘everywhere’, its impacts are experienced somewhere. Our initial paper was therefore an attempt to encourage geographers to think carefully yet politically about the actually existing nature of the necropolitics multiple.
This question of the ‘everywhere’ and the ‘somewhere’ of course comes down to positionality as Dunlap notes, but it also resonates with both longer-standing geographical debates around ‘totalities’ and ‘constitutive outsides’ (Conroy, 2024), and emerging ones about subsumption (Cowan, Forthcoming). These questions will only become more important as ever more lives are rendered surplus to the functioning of contemporary necropolitical orders (Alami et al., 2024). In-and-against this, the ‘everywhere’ is of course appealing, helping us find common opposition and seemingly build solidarity more easily. Yet, uncritical readings of this totality can flatten experience and, precisely by making it more nebulous, strengthen the enemy that tries to subsume us. As we wrote in the original piece: ‘if every injustice and form of structural violence is rendered an example of ‘the living dead’ then the elasticity and utility of necropolitics might “snap”’ (Peters et al., 2025: 470). So perhaps instead, following calls from the decompositions collective (2024), more cautious, detailed, and careful reflection and analysis is needed in the face of the continued threats of capitalism, statism, and extractivism. As a framework necropolitics can, and we argue should, be part of this process. Our use of it, however, should avoid trying to be everything and everywhere all at once. This therefore shows both the limits, but also the possibilities, of theory.
Despite these shared concerns and considerations, we hope our contribution – alongside Dunlap’s thoughtful response – highlights the importance of necropolitical theory within the discipline of geography, whether focusing on environmental destruction, political borders, and much beyond. We conclude by reaffirming our conviction that necropolitics is a useful framework for understanding ‘forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead’ (Mbembe 2003: 40). As we have argued, it is increasingly ‘incumbent on critical geographers, in their analysis of the grey areas between life and death, to not lose sight of…necropolitical (infra)structures, while always foregrounding the resolve and resistance of those most impacted’ (Peters et al., 2025: 479). We close with the words of the late Palestinian geographer Abdel Nasser Al-Saqqa, written shortly before he was killed by Israel: ‘Maybe better days will bring us together’ (Ahmad Abu Sitta, 2024). His words remind us that the necropolitical world we inhabit is neither natural nor inevitable. It was made by us, and can thus be unmade.