Getting Away with Murder: Unpacking Epistemic Mechanisms of Necropower and Disposability in North America

Abstract

The necroempowered agents in North America not only continually commit murder and profit from it, but—literally and worse still—lawfully get away with it. This chapter argues that it is essential—and urgent—to develop an understanding of the mechanisms producing and sustaining necropower and disposability in North America at the epistemic level, and to do so in a way that breaks free from the epistemic coloniality that plagues most research. Four epistemic mechanisms sustaining the order of necropowers in the region are identified and analyzed: normalization of violence and death, masculinization, marketization and derision. Shedding light on these four epistemic mechanisms allows the researcher to bring forward three contributions. First, theoretically, a better understanding of the epistemological frame constructing and perpetuating this particular organization of death by design can foster more effective documentation of necropowers’ empirical materializations. Second, this epistemological understanding has organizational and managerial implications for those—leaders, policymakers, associations, civil society—seeking to resist instances, knowledge claims, discourses and agents of necropower. Finally, this develops an epistemological contribution by thinking such matters from the ‘margins’, with a critical and transformational purpose.