Necropolitics to whom? Recognizing positionality, politics, and extractive intensity

Are the idea, framework, and theory of necropolitics overplayed and abused?The review article, "Necropolitics and Geography," by Peters et al. (2025) implicitly engages this question by providing an astute overview by, first, flushing out the relationship between biopolitics and necropolitics and, second, examining how the term has been used in environmental and border research within human geography.The authors identify "two related tendencies," which they call "'necro-everything' and the 'everything-necro'" (p.2).The former, the authors explain, "concerns the rapid, and at times uncritical expansion of the necro-prfiex, while the latter refers to work that has an analytical tendency to focus solely on death" (p.2).The authors remind readers that disciplinary/biopower and biopolitics/ necropolitics analytical divide is never wholly separate, and that necropolitics is never just about "death," but an entire gamut of "slow" and "fast" deprivations, wounding(s), degradations, poisoning(s), and, considered broadly, enslavements and killings.Relishing this overview provided by Peters and colleagues (2025), this commentary simultaneously agrees with the concerns while noting how a "necro-everything" position can become more tenable.