Political violence is not only episodic force. It is also produced through ordinary techniques of rule: policing and carcerality, occupation and counterinsurgency, border control, welfare conditionality, and the patterned dispossession of land and labour. This Collection invites interdisciplinary contributions on how these governmental practices distribute exposure to harm along racial and colonial lines, deciding whose lives are supported, whose injuries are normalised, and whose deaths are rendered ungrievable.
Building on established debates on biopolitics, thanatopolitics and the governance of life in modern political theory, this collection reorients the conversation by foregrounding race, coloniality, and the afterlives of empire as organising conditions of political violence. In this spirit, we place Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics in dialogue with scholarship on racialised state violence and survival (including Jasbir K. Puar, Didier Fassin, and Christina Sharpe), while also welcoming decolonial and Indigenous approaches that contest the epistemic and material infrastructures of domination.
We encourage submissions that examine colonial genealogy and contemporary practice across, for example: racial capitalism and state racism; borders, camps, deportation and the criminalisation of mobility; policing, prisons and surveillance; colonial medicine, public health and “risk” governance; land theft, extractivism and ecological devastation; gendered and sexualised regimes of violence; and counter-conduct, abolitionist and decolonial strategies of resistance. By centring these colonial and racial dimensions, the collection aims to develop sharper conceptual tools and grounded empirical accounts of political violence, alongside accounts of refusal, repair and transformative politics.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Biopolitics, colonialism, and political violence: theoretical intersections
- Necropolitics and the coloniality of power
- State racism and the racialisation of populations
- Colonial and postcolonial forms of displacement, dispossession, and forced migration
- Borders, camps, and the governance of mobility in postcolonial contexts
- Indigenous struggles against colonial violence and ecological exploitation
- Colonial medicine, public health, and the politics of life and death
- Carcerality, racialised policing, and the colonial state
- Gendered and sexualised dimensions of biopolitical and colonial violence
- Decolonial epistemologies, counter-biopolitics, and practices of resistance
Editors
Submitting a paper for consideration
To submit your manuscript for consideration at Humanities & Social Sciences Communications as part of this Collection, please follow the steps detailed on this page. On the first page of our online submission system, please select your article type from the drop down menu. When on the “details” tab, you will be presented with the option to select which Collection your article should be submitted to. Authors should also express their interest in the Collection in their cover letter.
Please ensure that your manuscript is submitted before midnight GMT on the listed deadline date. The submission system will close at exactly 00:00 GMT on the following day, so late submissions cannot be accepted.
Accepted papers are published on a rolling basis as soon as they are ready.
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