Maroon Anti-necropolitics

Abstract

This article describes Maroon anti-necropolitics and its implications for multispecies justice to aid in creating a genuinely decolonial Caribbean ecological theory. Ndyuka Maroons, the descendants of one nation of self-liberated formerly enslaved Black Surinamese peoples, have created a cosmopolitical order based on the refusal of necropolitics (which is the assumption that politics must be predicated on the sovereign human appropriation of the right to kill or let die). In its place, Ndyukas practice an ethics of sociality premised on the shared collective vulnerability of present and future generations to the consequences of acts of killing. This Maroon anti-necropolitics has three primary principles: (1) death always relates specific deaths to future collective harm; (2) humans do not have a sovereign right to death over the lives of others; and (3) death does not rupture relations between the living and the dead, or the community and its enemies, but intensifies them by imposing ineradicable connections of tragic loss between perpetrators and victims. Ndyukas accordingly articulate a theory of relational justice that rejects human sovereignty while emphasizing human responsibility. This article illustrates how Maroons have imagined a world beyond necropolitics and why this helps confront the ways in which necropolitical assumptions inflect how multispecies justice is imagined.