The Politics of Death is an ongoing collaborative project examining the relationship between psychiatry and systematic violence against civilians in national and (settler) colonial settings. We are a group of international interdisciplinary scholars who thrive to produce a collaborative global and theoretically driven study that thinks through the history of psychiatry in relation to biopolitics and state power. We are inspired by works that argue that the increasing visibility of violence against civilians is the outcome of “permanent security imperatives” rooted in state desires to make “themselves invulnerable” (Moses, 2021). We suggest that the desire for “permanent security” is not “limited” to ethnic, racial, or national genocide but includes a biological/biopolitical/necropolitical dimension of permanent security. Psychiatrists, nationally and internationally, were often the “experts” who constructed “madness” and identified “invisible” (genetic) risks rendering some men and women undesirable, unproductive, dangerous, and in some cases not worth living.
