This book offers a contemporary look at violence in Mexico and argues for a recalibration in how necropolitics, as the administration of life and death, is understood. The author locates the forces of mortality directly on the body, rather than as an object of government, thereby placing death in a politics of the everyday. This necropolitics is explored through testimonies of individuals living in towns overrun by organized crime and resistance groups, namely, the autodefensa movement, that operate throughout Michoacán, one of the most violent states in Mexico. This volume studies how individuals and communities go on living not in spite of the death that surrounds life, but more disturbingly by attuning to it.

Explores the immanent production of life albeit amid violence that underpins contemporary politics Focuses on crises themselves, rather than their aftermath, and thereby pointing to a living amid violent death Decentralizes death beyond the state to involve a range of actors (cartels, vigilante groups) that dislodge questions of administration

Autorentext
R. Guy Emerson is Professor at the Department of International Relations and Political Science at the Universidad de las Américas Puebla, Mexico.

Inhalt
1: Life, death and power.- 2: Necropolitics: From corpse to body.- 3: The wounded body: A necropolitics of living death.- 4: Necropolitics and resistance: The autodefensa movement.- 5: Thanatopolitics: Mutilating autodefensas.- 6: Mutilation extended.- 7: Making killable: (Pure) violence and a suicidal state.- 8: Necropolitics: Governing by the campfire.