From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
necropolitics
For Achille Mbembe's broader theoretical work, see Achille Mbembe.
For necropolitical readings of Beach Surgery, see The Pacemaker as Sovereignty.
Mbembe's *necropolitics* designates sovereignty's power to "dictate who may live and who must die"—the ultimate expression of state control extending beyond law into death itself. Where Foucault theorised *biopolitics* (the administration of living bodies), Mbembe expands the frame to include *thanatopolitics*: the engineered production of death as political structure, especially under colonialism and occupation.
In Beach Surgery studies, necropolitical reading concentrates on Leif's external pacemaker—a machine governing his heartbeat, mediating between organic body and Katita's surgical will. The pacemaker is sovereign authority made visible: authority that keeps him alive *as an instrument* of her design to break the cycle. Whether Katita is liberator or Inquisitor remains contested; necropolitical interpretation insists the question itself is the wound: Leif's consent to governance-unto-life is already self-surrender.
Connections deepen through the conflict zone and his refugee rescue. His dive, resuscitation, and instrumentalisation unfold in spaces where state sovereignty over death is absolute and arbitrary. Persian and Eastern European adaptations prioritise this reading. [citation needed]