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Government

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Technology

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1 APR

I surrender to the surveillance state

Dear Surveillance State, Today, I turned my microphone on and recorded some thoughts on being online. This is going to be a new podcast series from me about living under surveillance by big tech and govts…. And I guess, most importantly, on life under constant social surveillance by civilians: how we monitor each others’ lives online, how we are all basically data-farming each other on socials. For what? You tell me. Allegedly, L. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thesurveillancestate.substack.com

1 Apr

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28 min
2 APR

Transediting necropolitics BBC’s Arabic and English coverage of Gaza’s digital blackout

Mahmoud Alhirthani (09 Mar 2026): Transediting necropolitics BBC’s Arabic and English coverage of Gaza’s digital blackout, Journal of Multicultural Discourses, DOI: 10.1080/17447143.2026.2639337 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

2 Apr

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2 min
2 APR

Civil and Civic Death in the New Authoritarianisms: Punishment of Dissidents through Juridical Destruction, Ethical Ruin, and Necropolitics in Turkey

Abstract: Since the Turkish government’s recent turn to authoritarianism, tens of thousands of public dissidents and government critics have been subjected to dismissals and revocation of civic rights via emergency decrees. The victims call this process ‘civil death’. We aim to understand the logic behind this form of punishment in Turkey by examining the differential genealogy of civil death in the work of Hannah Arendt, Bertrand Ogilvie, Giorgio Agamben, and Achille Mbembe. We demonstrate that a later form of civil death was used by totalitarian regimes in a process leading to the reduction of targeted individuals as ‘superfluous’ and as ‘living corpses’ in concentration camps. In these contexts, death became an instrument of biopolitical and necropolitical powers. We propose that although contemporary punishment of public dissidents in Turkey shares some similarities with these forms of civil death, it may more fittingly be identified as civic death. We argue that while civil death is based on the classical political right of the sovereign to ‘make die’ after first reducing targeted individuals to little more than living corpses, civic death is linked to the power of the sovereign to ‘let die’ through the exclusion of public dissidents from economic, social, and political life. Citation: Özdemir, Seçkin Sertdemir, and Esra Özyürek. “Civil and Civic Death in the New Authoritarianisms: Punishment of Dissidents through Juridical Destruction, Ethical Ruin, and Necropolitics in Turkey.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 46, no. 5 (2019): 699–713. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48541175. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

2 Apr

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2 min
1 DAY AGO

Between exclusion and escape: necropolitics, biopolitics, and queer narratives in Nollywood films

Abstract: This research examines the representation of queer characters in Nigerian films through the lenses of necropolitics and biopolitics. Although LGBTQ+ presence in Nollywood has increased, there is a lack of scholarly focus on their experiences of internal migration and the forces impacting their lives. This study analyzes Hell or High Water, We Don’t Live Here Anymore, and Walking in Shadow to explore themes of exclusion, escape, and erasure amidst societal norms and necropolitical pressures. Using Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics alongside Michel Foucault’s biopower, the research investigates how these narratives navigate social stigma, state violence, and internalized discrimination, revealing broader patterns of marginalization. This work emphasizes the need for inclusive and nuanced portrayals of LGBTQ+ experiences in Nigerian media. Citation: Okadigwe, M. N. (2025). Between exclusion and escape: necropolitics, biopolitics, and queer narratives in Nollywood films. African Identities, 23(4), 1047–1065. https://doi.org/10.1080/14725843.2025.2501794 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

1 day ago

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1 min
2 DAYS AGO

Intention setting & strategy for my digital goals

Dear Surveillance State, Today I braindumped a couple of ways to strategise how I go about doing this… Can you imagine just decades ago, people didn’t have an added layer to their existence of thinking about how to integrate and balance their lives with technology? Is it not that deep? Am I over-thinking things? With self-doubt, L. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thesurveillancestate.substack.com

2 days ago

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25 min
2 APR

The Necropolitics of Expendability: Migrant Farm Workers During COVID-19

Abstract: COVID-19 has made visible and deepened inequalities globally, while also manifesting the vital role of functional food, health, and care systems in a context of strong socio-ecological interdependencies. We here mobilize bio– and necro–politics to problematize the declaration of agricultural workers as ‘essential’ and the accompanying policies during the early months of the pandemic, focusing on the region of Lleida, Spain. We show how this proclaimed indispensability was aiming mostly at securing cheap labor to agri-business while workers continued to be treated as expendable. An intersectionality lens allows us to understand discrimination and racism as health determinants, operating within and deﬁning ‘glocal’ food necropolitics and COVID-19 biopolitics. Citation: Panagiota Kotsila & Lucía Argüelles (2024) The necropolitics of expendability: migrant farm workers during COVID-19, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 51:2, 441-465, DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2023.2243440 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

2 Apr

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1 min
6 DAYS AGO

A Necropolitical Visual Regime: Banditry in Colombia, 1958–1964

Abstract: From 1958 to 1964 in Colombia, during the first years of the partisan power-sharing agreement known as the National Front, roving crews of gunmen labelled ‘bandits’ who had been mobilised and then abandoned by party elites terrorised local populations in the countryside. We track the gruesome photographic record of that violence: first, as it was produced by bandits who recruited photography in their bids for local sovereignty; second, as it circulated through government and media accounts that turned those same images back on the bandits as part of the military’s hunt for them as outlaws; and third, as a group of scholar-activists used them in academic publications that sought to shock the public into conscious concern and stimulate a sociological discussion about what caused and fuelled the violence. We argue that disparate uses of the same type of images – portraits of bandits and the cadavers, often mutilated, of their victims – constituted a necropolitical visual regime in which the elite consensus between government and press most effectively harnessed the photographs’ affective charge and channelled it into the pacification effort. Alexander L. Fattal & Andrés F. Caicedo Sierra (2023) A Necropolitical Visual Regime: Banditry in Colombia, 1958–1964, History of Photography, 47:4, 368-388, DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2024.2429879 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

6 days ago

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2 min
3 APR

'From the closet into the Knesset’: Zionist sexual politics and the formation of settler subjectivity

Abstract: This article examines Zionist sexual politics as a particular modality of settler colonial subject making. It analyses the inclusion of Israeli LGBTs into the state, by examining the cultural archive of Zionism, in which the colonisation of Palestine and Palestinians is constitutively inscribed and obscured. Tracing the itinerary of Israel’s LGBT movement, it looks at how the Zionist project becomes articulated on novel terms. Focusing on the specific formation of an Israeli gay identity in tandem with Israel’s shifting settler colonial discourse and sexual politics, this article suggests that the itinerary of Israel’s LGBT movement forms the condition of possibility for Israel’s pinkwashing campaign to take shape. Following Palestinian anticolonial queer interventions that see pinkwashing as part of the Zionist project, it intervenes in analytical practices that frame pinkwashing as a manifestation that arises from the global conditions of homonationalism. It asks: how does Zionist settler colonialism form the conditions of possibility for an Israeli gay subjectivity and pinkwashing to emerge? In doing so, it complements contemporary conversations on the formation of sexual subjectivities within settler colonial contexts by suggesting that these not only define modern sexual politics, but simultaneously re-shuffle the foundations of the Zionist settler colonial project itself. Citation: Stelder, M. (2018) ‘‘From the closet into the Knesset’: Zionist sexual politics and the formation of settler subjectivity’, Settler Colonial Studies, 8(4), pp. 442–463. doi: 10.1080/2201473X.2017.1361885. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

3 Apr

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2 min
4 DAYS AGO

Where the route ends and the new border begins: necropolitical governance and migrant resistance in the Canary Islands

Abstract: This article examines the Western Atlantic migration corridor to the Canary Islands, one of Europe’s most perilous yet persistently traversed routes, through the conceptual lens of infrastructures of endurance. Drawing on fieldwork in El Hierro and Tenerife, it employs patchwork ethnography and semi-structured interviews with migrants from West Africa and the Horn of Africa. A distinctive feature is my engagement as a Red Cross volunteer in El Hierro, which provides rare access to humanitarian infrastructures and their moral economies. The study integrates Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics with migration-infrastructure theory to theorise infrastructures of endurance as fragile, moral, and material assemblages through which migrants collectively sustain life amid systemic restrictions. Four interconnected dynamics structure the analysis: fragmented journeys, necropolitical exposure at sea, reception as humanitarian deterrence, and solidarities that make endurance possible. Findings show how migrants convert abandonment into provisional architectures of life. The Canary Islands emerge as experimental sites of European border governance where deterrence, hospitality, and resistance collide. Conceptually, the article advances infrastructures of endurance to rethink corridors, survival, solidarity, and mobility justice within Europe’s expanding necropolitical migration regime. Citation: Salifu, M. (2026) ‘Where the route ends and the new border begins: necropolitical governance and migrant resistance in the Canary Islands’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, pp. 1–23. doi: 10.1080/1369183X.2026.2646983. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

4 days ago

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2 min
2 APR

Necropolitics of Achille Mbembe: An Extended Essay on the Book

Gržinić, M. (2022). Necropolitics of Achillo Mbembe: An Extended Essay on the Book. Philosophical Vestnik, 42(1). https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.42.1.10 (Original work published 31 December 2021). This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

2 Apr

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2 min

Welcome to Channel 54. My name is Liv and I make podcasts with a side of politics.

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54

Top Shows

I surrender to the surveillance state

Transediting necropolitics BBC’s Arabic and English coverage of Gaza’s digital blackout

Civil and Civic Death in the New Authoritarianisms: Punishment of Dissidents through Juridical Destruction, Ethical Ruin, and Necropolitics in Turkey

Between exclusion and escape: necropolitics, biopolitics, and queer narratives in Nollywood films

Intention setting & strategy for my digital goals

The Necropolitics of Expendability: Migrant Farm Workers During COVID-19

A Necropolitical Visual Regime: Banditry in Colombia, 1958–1964

'From the closet into the Knesset’: Zionist sexual politics and the formation of settler subjectivity

Where the route ends and the new border begins: necropolitical governance and migrant resistance in the Canary Islands

Necropolitics of Achille Mbembe: An Extended Essay on the Book

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