Biopolitical management culminates in neoimperialism and state-sanctioned targeting – the demarcation of the “other” undergirds necropolitical violence.

While biopolitics and necropolitics have gained more and more scholarly attention, we aim in this Special Issue to nuance this conversation by emphasizing feminist and queer investments and by adding the analytical lens of cosmopolitics to the ongoing debates around life/living and death/ dying in the current political climate. The migration crisis, the rise of populism on a global scale, neoimperial practices and homonationalist strategies, and state-sanctioned targeting of gender, sexual, racial and ethnic ‘others’ are only a few of the crises that we face today and that mark some lives as more – or less – worthy than others. As Foucault (2003, 2008) outlined in his groundbreaking analysis, biopower, a new governing strategy focused on the regulation of populations and the management of life, arose in the late eighteenth century. This notion of ‘making live and letting die’ marked a significant shift from a medieval system wherein a singular sovereign could exercise the power to ‘let live and make die’ over a hierarchically organized people. The new governmentality also instigated a modernized notion of the social body and the subjects that embodied it. As Foucault describes, this technology exerted social and political power over a new type of social structure: ‘not exactly society . . . nor is it the individual-as-body. It is a new body, a multiple body, a body with so many heads that, while they might not be infinite in number, cannot necessarily be counted’ (Foucault, 2003, p. 245). As the target of biopolitical management, this ‘multiple body’ requires forms of governance under which new and updated modes of control of both human and non-human agents are created and implemented. In this system, discourse and/as power produces a social subject who willingly selfimplements the basic rules of Law Now, several decades after Foucault’s intervention and the emergence of biopower and a mode of governance known as biopolitics, we are forced to account for death and dying in a neo-imperial and neoliberal era in which a majority of people around the globe are pushed into precarious living situations, where millions of refugees are attempting to cross borders, specifically those of Europe and the United States, and in which technologies of destruction are not only more pervasive but have also become more sensorial (Mbembe, 2003, p. 34). In his supplement to Foucauldian biopolitics, Achille Mbembe, therefore, interrogates if the notion of biopower is still adequate in accounting for the contemporary political economy. ‘What place’, he asks, ‘is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?’ (Mbembe, 2003, p. 12). As his theoretical paradigm of analysis, Mbembe coins the terms necropower and necropolitics to explain how life in a biopolitical frame is always already subjugated to and determined by the power of death (Mbembe, 2003, 2019). In this sense, necropolitics questions in today’s political climate who gets to live and who must die – or who must live and who is let die – thereby putting forth a different hypothesis than had Foucault’s conceptualization of biopower. While thinking with the Foucauldian theoretical paradigms of analysis, necropolitics is much more concerned with how life is subjugated to the power of death. Thus, rather than showing how life and death are both structuring instruments of power (as if in a relation of equivalence), necropolitics asks about the asymmetrical conditioning of who gets to live and who must die. While Foucault keeps a certain conceptual distance, Mbembe emphasizes that they are no longer an even pair. Death, making die, is what structures living. Necropolitics thereby uncovers how certain bodies are cultivated for life and (re)production while others are systemically marked for death, constructing a constantly shifting borderline between subjects deemed ‘productive’ and ‘lawful’ and non-subjects branded as ‘illegitimate’ or ‘illegal’. The concept of necropolitics also accounts for contemporary warfare and the various ways in which, as Mbembe explains, ‘weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creating of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life’ (2003, p. 40). Referencing not only physical death but also social death, these death-worlds severely impact entire populations, ‘conferring upon them the status of living dead’ (Mbembe, 2003, p. 40). In the same vein, concepts like Lauren Berlant’s slow death (2007) and Rob Nixon’s slow violence (2011) underscore how the deterioration, devastation and destruction of certain human and non-human populations are a hallmark of necropolitical modes of governance and engagement. The way in which the conditions of possibility for life and death also come to be linked with the distribution of resources represents a fundamental bio- and necropolitical negotiation (Agamben, 1998; Butler, 2004; Mbembe, 2003, 2019; Weheliye, 2014). Nonetheless, life and death cannot be separated: biopolitics and necropolitics are not opposites. Rather, they are ‘two sides of the same coin’, as Rosi Braidotti explains (2013, p. 122). They are lenses that come together to allow us to analyse contemporary power relations and examine the inextricable politics of life and death at work on a planetary scale today. This focus of critical research has been supplemented by a growing body of innovative scholarship in feminist and queer studies on biopower and necropower. Kyla Schuller (2018), for instance, documents in The Biopolitics of Feeling how race and sex became entangled in the nineteenthcentury US context, with biopower serving to consolidate ‘in a sentimental mode that regulated the circulation of feeling throughout the population and delineated differential relational capacities of matter, and therefore the potential for evolutionary progress, as the modern concepts of race, sex, and species’ (2018, p. 5). Meanwhile, in the contemporary context, Alexander Weheliye (2014) closely analyses the racial dimensions of biopolitics and necropolitics in Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Drawing inspiration from the seminal works of Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter, Weheliye interrogates the role of race in foundationally shaping modern notions of the human itself. His theory of ‘racializing assemblages’ understands race as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, notquite-humans and nonhumans. Further, Mel Y. Chen’s Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (2014) has been foundational in its application of the concept of the ‘animacy hierarchy’ to interrogate the questionable yet materializing distinctions made between the living and the dead. This thinking through animacy as the hierarchically structured condition of what is considered life and liveability, or toxicity and disposability, makes a great contribution to disability studies and queer of colour critique. Theoretical explorations of biopolitics and necropolitics have also been taken up within the field of queer studies. Jasbir K. Puar (2007, 2017) has been particularly instrumental in provoking an expanding body of work on queer necropolitics. Puar’s persuasive analysis has, for example, been furthered by the collection Queer Necropolitics, where Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman and Silvia Posocco use queer necropolitics as ‘a tool to make sense of the symbiotic co-presence of life and death’ in order to analyse the distinction of ‘queer subjects invited into life and queerly abjected populations marked for death’ (Haritaworn, Kuntsman, & Posocco, 2014, p. 2). In trans studies as well, bio- and necropolitics have been useful in helping articulate how increased visibility and representation of trans and non-binary individuals happen alongside increasing and intensifying violence towards trans communities, particularly those of colour (cárdenas, 2017; Gossett, Stanley, & Burton, 2017; Snorton, 2017). But while it may be that biopolitics and necropolitics could be the quickest to turn to in working through the contemporary sociopolitical climate, in our project of presenting queer and feminist interventions, we want to supplement this discussion by engaging with the concept of cosmopolitics. We take this concept from Isabelle Stengers who understands the cosmos as an operator of ‘putting into equality’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 995). She proposes a cosmopolitics, which while modelled on the ideal scientific method, considers all assumptions and facts as being open to question. In this sense, her cosmopolitical proposal precisely challenges the taken-for-granted ‘modern’ (i.e. colonial, patriarchal, capitalist) pretensions of objectivity, rationality and truth.4 Stengers’ cosmopolitical approach must therefore also be distinguished from the humanist classical understanding of cosmopolitanism, which aimed, as she writes, ‘at a project of a political kind [. . .] in which everyone might envisage themselves as members in their own right of the worldwide society’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 994). Stengers’ use of cosmos is different. Instead of a rights-based approach that brushes over precarious questions of in-/ exclusion, cosmos in her thinking refers to ‘the unknown constituted by the [. . .] multiple, divergent worlds and to the articulations of which they could eventually be capable’ (2005, p. 995). Her project is premised on the idea that a politics that is not attached to a cosmos is moot, but that a cosmos detached from politics is irrelevant. Turning away from the universalizing assumptions of postEnlightenment secular liberalism, Stengers admits that her ‘cosmopolitical proposal is incapable of giving a “good” definition of the procedures that allow us to achieve the “good” definition of a “good” common world’ (ibid.). Thus, this cosmopolitics cannot be read as aprogramme or a new political horizon to be striven for in the progressivist logic of linearity, overcoming and leaving behind. Rather, she emphasizes that cosmopolitics ‘happens in the mode of indeterminacy, that is, of the event from which nothing follows, no “and so. . .,” but that confronts everyone with the question of how they will inherit from it’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 996). Given our contemporary political climate, it might be too simple to reiterate the all-too-common political dogmas: equality, justice, freedom, recognition. Participating politically in a foundationally bio- and necropolitically structured world requires complicating the political equation so that equality and justice are precisely not taken in the logic of equivalence (that is, a logic of interchangeability and based on a preset ‘common’ measure). A cosmopolitical perspective demands the most complex constellation of various participating perspectives and (non-)agencies, because ‘[t]hose who meet have to know that nothing can erase the debt binding their decision to its victims . . .. Equality does not mean that they all have the same say in the matter but that they all have to be present in the mode that makes the decision as difficult as possible’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 1003).