The necro politics of informality: contested strategies of banishment, carceralisation and peripheralisation

Abstract

Many residents in Southern cities work and live in an informal ‘grey space’ between recognition and unrecognition and are vulnerable to shifts towards violent ways of governing. This article delineates a necropolitics of informality as an analytical lens to unpack the processes at work when violence becomes a prominent mode of governing urban informality. This lens, it is argued, can extend familiar perspectives on the political dynamics of informality. Such an approach is then used to examine a major necropolitical turn in the management of street work in central Maputo, Mozambique. Attention is given to the spatial strategies of banishment, carceralisation and peripheralisation – and attendant socio-material processes – through which necropower reworked the politics and spatialities of street work. The article uncovers the processes of political dispossession and the calculated destruction of collective organisation, as well as the necropolitical respatialisation of street economies and the range of (necro)spaces that emerged. The ways in which the impacted groups experienced and acted upon necropolitical practices are examined. While the shift occurred during the COVID-19 crisis, such practices continued long beyond the pandemic, pointing to the relevance of the necropolitics of informality as a lens for understanding violent governance in both exceptional and ordinary times.