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West Papua is a non-self-governing territory without much prominence in international debates. While offering an overview of the province’s political, social and environmental troubles, this chapter chiefly focuses on concrete issues in the field of education (such as its literacy and early school drop-out rates, inequality in opportunities and access to education, poor infrastructure or the low quality of teaching) through analysis of the educational resources that Indonesia, as administrator of the region, offers to West Papuans. In general, the control that Indonesia exerts over West Papua could be said to rely on the use of violence, repression, expropriation, depopulation, and even indiscriminate killings. Therefore, the chapter also encourages debate on the geopolitical status of West Papua by placing it within the framework of postcolonial studies and suggesting that the notions of necropolitics and necroeducation should be taken as a complementary perspective from which to approach its situation in the study of comparative and international education.

The chapter explores how the recent storyline about modern slavery has landed in Ambridge, commending the writers and producers for the job they have done in engaging NGOs and pressure groups active in this area. It situates the plight of ‘The Horses’ as hidden in plain sight and probes the dark side of this important social issue in the context of how far the systematic exploitation of vulnerable people provides a ground floor within a profoundly unequal economy. Modern slavery speaks of a wider form of neoliberal necropolitics – in which logics of accumulation and hierarchies are played out on the bodies of workers. In this form of political economy social and emotional vulnerability and economic precarity combine together, trapping those unable to escape exploitation. It explored the policy context for the Modern Slavery Act and the assessment of how many people are enslaved in the UK. I also make the link from the extreme nature of modern slavery and connections with extractive and abusive employment situations throughout the economy. While Modern Slavery is an extreme form of precarity, where people are controlled and forced to work, scholarship on precarity shows us that it is a spectrum disorder, where economic abandonment pushes people away from a liveable life.

This chapter offers feminist perspectives on the violence exercised by female avengers in popular audiovisual products about narcotrafficking from Mexico and Colombia. Through the case studies of the narcotelenovela Rosario Tijeras (RCN Televisión, 2010) and the B movie Sanguinarios del M1 (Alonso Ortiz Lara, 2011), we explore how recent Latin American narco-narratives rearticulate the ‘rape-revenge’ film. Following Valencia's conceptualisation of necroempowerment (2012), we argue that female characters respond to rape with ruthless methods in an effort to regain agency. We combine existing literature in feminist film studies with postcolonial readings of the specificities of rape-revenge in the narco-universe where the violence these heroines use as retaliation is already the norm for their male counterparts. A close reading of revenge sequences underscores how vengeance can constitute a cathartic outlet for enraged female characters, challenging stereotypes of feminine passiveness and subverting gender hierarchies. However, it also perpetuates a patriarchal order based on toxic ideals of individual power achieved through bloody methods. We examine how empowerment can entrap female protagonists and serve to differentiate the types of violence that each gender has access to, and we discuss the problematic representation of rape as a transformative moment necessary for women to later become powerful.

This chapter will address the deployments of colonial governmentality during the first decade of US dominion in Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Governmentality is understood as dispositive, that is, an ensemble of the apparatuses of governmental rationality, sovereignty, and discipline. This chapter will examine the shifting configurations of some of the specific apparatuses of necro- and biopolitics, coercive security forces, disciplinary institutions, and other tutelary practices within the overall dispositive of governmentality, including the political structures of governance. This chapter will address the issue of the place and scale of these deployments: institutions, public spaces, bureaucratic structures, and military hierarchies. Throughout, a comparative perspective will shed light upon how colonial governmentality was deployed historically in ways that were adapted to different strategies, local conditions, and patterns of collaboration and resistance, especially among school teachers.

To better understand states’ technologies of violence, colonisation, and military occupation, this chapter shares Jerusalemite children’s written and spoken opposition to the mundane yet intimate governance of Israel’s ‘combat proven’ politics over their lives. ‘Combat proven’ politics are forms of surveillance, strategies of control, imprisonment, torture, murder, and techniques of managing colonised populations that are mobilised in service of the state. Combat proven politics turn children’s everyday spaces into a ‘show room’ – a living laboratory – for states, arms companies, and security agencies (both private and public) to market their technologies as ‘tested positively’. As sites of violence proliferate in these contexts, children are folded into the testing ground of ‘combat proven’ politics, intensifying and incentivising infrastructural warfare. Occupied East Jerusalem, where the children in this study live, acutely illustrates how combat proven politics is driven by a concentration of biopolitics, geopolitics (including the topography of settlement and colonial architecture), and necropolitics. At the same time, children’s language of life subverts the logic of the death machines.

This chapter is a reflection on the digital mediation of death and dying in the COVID-19 pandemic from a critical political economy perspective. It asks: What is the role of the communication of death and dying in capitalist society? How has communication with dying loved ones changed in the COVID-19 pandemic? What roles have digital technologies and capitalism played in this context?

Building on foundational theoretical insights into the role of death and dying in capitalism, this essay presents some empirical studies of death and dying in society and the COVID-19 pandemic and interprets their findings from a Communication Studies perspective.

In capitalist societies, death and dying are taboo topics and are hidden, invisible and institutionalised. The COVID-19 pandemic had contradictory effects on the role of death in society. It is a human, cultural and societal universal that humans want to die in company with loved ones. The presented empirical studies confirm the insights of the philosophers Kwasi Wiredu and Jürgen Habermas that humans are fundamentally social and communicative beings from the cradle to the grave. The wish to die in a social manner derives from humans' social and communicative nature. In capitalism, the reality of dying diverges from the ideal of dying. Capitalism hides, individualises, makes invisible and institutionalises death and dying.

The analysed studies confirm the insights of the philosophers Kwasi Wiredu and Jürgen Habermas that humans are fundamentally social and communicative beings from the cradle to the grave. Building and going beyond the works of the political theorist and philosopher Achille Mbembe and the philosopher and sociologist Erich Fromm, the essay introduces the notion of capitalist necropower. It is shown how the COVID-19 pandemic in many cases destroyed the social and communicative nature of human beings and how capitalist necropower created unnecessary surplus deaths and formed the context of the digital mediation of communication with dying loved ones in the pandemic.