Introduction
In May 2022, after a three-month siege, brutal destructions and mass deaths, the city of Mariupol fell under Russian control. In less than a month, Russians changed the Ukrainian letter “i” with a Russian “и” on the welcome sign of the city (Suspilne Donbas Reference Donbas2022). As one of the first actions, the invading forces started to change symbols, arrest teachers of Ukrainian language and history, confiscate Ukrainian books from schools and libraries, and replace them with the new, Russian ones. Sham construction works began in the destroyed city, celebrated by the Russian TV and media. The invading forces further proceeded with exhumations of the buried bodies, not giving them to the relatives and prohibiting their proper reburial (Zmina.ua 2022). These developments are not limited to Mariupol only, but are present in other territories of Ukraine, occupied by Russia since 2014 and 2022.
Taking as the starting point Achille Mbembe’s (Reference Mbembe2003) definition of necropolitics as “the subjugation of life to the power of death”, this article investigates the multiple modalities and operations of death-making power in the context of Russia’s war on Ukraine. While the most obvious manifestation of necropolitics is causing physical harm and death, many other forms of violence belong to the same repertoire, even if they do not lead to immediate physical destruction (Bargu Reference Bargu2021). Building upon the ideas of necropolitics (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2003), visual necropolitics (Deprez Reference Deprez2023), and the insights into everyday forms of violence and subjugation (Mayblin et al. Reference Mayblin, Wake and Kazemi2020), this article argues that necropolitics of Russia’s war on Ukraine is felt and experienced not only through “preparing bodies for death”, but also through an assault on the traditions, identities, and identifications of those subjected to it. This expanded and nuanced understanding of the necropolitics of war is more in line with the lived experiences of the populations under attack and occupation. Literature on the necropolitics of war tends to focus on the material presence of death through the overt operations of violent power in the form of killings and injuries (Makarychev and Medvedev Reference Makarychev and Medvedev2024; Deprez Reference Deprez2023; Mbembe Reference Mbembe and Corcoran2019). While those forms of death-making power are important, this article focuses on the more overlooked forms of necropolitics, found in everyday, symbolic violence and subjugation (Alphin and Debrix Reference Alphin and Debrix2020).
Relying on visual semiotic analysis (Rose Reference Rose2016), this article inductively identifies and illustrates two practices of visual necropolitics: manipulation of representation and a forceful imposition of a new identity. The first practice, manipulation of representation, is related to the (in-)visibilization of some representations, their change, and erasure. It includes practices such as performative re-building of destroyed cities, a change of symbols in the occupied areas, as well as silencing and erasure of experiences of death and violence via prohibition of burials. The second practice includes “re-education” of Ukrainian children on the occupied territories and the imposition of alternative celebrations to alter the cultural and national belonging of kids and other individuals (Havrylov Reference Havrylov2023).
With necropolitical violence as a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, the aim of this article is two-fold. First, it seeks to contribute to the conceptualization and problematization of visual necropolitics (Deprez Reference Deprez2023) as a weapon of both physical and social death. Second, by applying visual social semiotics method, it further looks into Russia’s necropolitical violence as not only a physical destruction of the Other, but also as a system of control which produces “profoundly unfree choices” (Roche Reference Roche2022). By imposing the status of “nonperson” on the population, the sovereign power denies them the place in the social order, thereby creating conditions of living within the society without being an actual member of it, or a condition of social death (Roche Reference Roche2022; Patterson Reference Patterson1985).
To do so, the article is structured as follows. It begins by outlining the conceptual approach of necropolitics and its visual dimension to highlight its predisposition towards the analysis of physical violence. It then discusses the methodological approach and the two key modalities of visual necropolitics – namely, representations manipulation and a forceful imposition of a new identity. The final sections elaborate on these two modalities and how they manifest themselves in the context of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Necropolitical violence and its dimensions: Conceptual framework
This article draws on two main conceptual frameworks to understand violence in the context of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Mbembe’s (Reference Mbembe2003) necropolitics and Deprez’s (Reference Deprez2023) visual necropolitics, which draw from Foucauldian biopolitics, points to the state of “living dead”, who can be either killed or “kept alive in a state of injury”. The article further connects (visual) necropolitics with social death (Card Reference Card2003) and everyday violence, the connection that is rarely made in IR (Thakur Reference Thakur2022). Furthermore, the idea of visuality assists in understanding the necropolitics of social life and everyday violence in the occupied zones of Ukraine.
Necropolitics
Necropolitics, or the politics of death, is a social paradigm that captures the ways in which those in power come to harm and destroy human lives. Coined by a postcolonial scholar Achille Mbembe as a “work of death” (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2003: 12), this concept was presented as complementary to a broader scholarly discussion on the biopolitical turn in international politics as a way of managing, controlling, and ruling over modern populations (Foucault Reference Foucault and Rabinow1997). Biopolitics as a technology of power focuses on the measures that take control of life in its positivity through health regulations, birth and mortality control, etc. Its “technologies and rationalities” (Rabinow and Rose Reference Rabinow and Rose2006) are based not only on force projection, but also on the management and taking care of people’s lives (Makarychev and Yatsyk Reference Makarychev and Yatsyk2017). Examples of such ‘life-producing’ technologies can be found in healthcare policies, regulation of reproduction, or biometric identification systems. However, these controlling and managing practices are perilous in that they can always transform from life-caring to life-taking modalities (Agamben Reference Agamben2005). In this context, the explanatory potential of necropolitics is in the centrality it places on taking lives, rather than producing or sustaining them.
Admittedly, no political system is immune to a transformation from life-giving to death-making. Previous studies have examined the necropolitical dimensions of UK and US drone warfare (e.g. Allinson Reference Allinson2015), EU’s and UK’s migration policies (Knittelfelder Reference Knittelfelder2023, Lopes and Ventos Reference Lopes and Ventos2023), and the death-making potential of the global capital (Gržinić and Šefik Reference Gržinić and Tatlić2014). Hovarth and Lowacz (Reference Hovarth and Lowacz2020) further argue that different manifestations of the biopolitical modes of governance take place “independently of political systems”. While necropolitical dimensions of power are omnipresent, this article builds upon Makarychev and Medvedev’s (Reference Makarychev and Medvedev2024) idea that the nexus between biopolitics and necropolitics has certain peculiarities depending on the type of the regime in question. Authoritarian biopolitics “is heavily contaminated and polluted with strong necropolitical elements” (Makarychev and Medvedev Reference Makarychev and Medvedev2024). In other words, necropolitical aspects are systematically, persistently, and intentionally embedded within the authoritarian biopolitical modes of power. Studies on illiberal regimes in Russia (Makarychev and Medvedev Reference Makarychev and Medvedev2015), Turkey (Bargu Reference Bargu2021), or Belarus (Lozka and Makarychev Reference Lozka and Makarychev2025) highlighted the connection between biopolitics and the authoritarian turn. The practices and mechanisms that such regimes use encompass not only control over the visions of family life or people’s sexual lives, but also widespread police terror and arbitrary arrests, mass incarceration, and tortures of political prisoners. In addition, these bio/necropolitical practices ‘at home’ readily spill over outside the borders. The artificially manufactured migrant crisis on the EU-Belarus border is one example how necropolitical practices can expand from the domestic to international realm (see Kazharski Reference Kazharski2023). Russia’s war on Ukraine can also be seen as an export of authoritarian necropolitics on the body of the neighbouring nation (Makarychev and Medvedev Reference Makarychev and Medvedev2024). It has exhibited unprecedented levels of violence and widespread war crimes, including extrajudicial killings and tortures of civilian population in places like Bucha, Mariupol, Kharkiv, among many others. Russia’s death-making power exhibits the characteristics Mbembe writes about. First, it produces territorial fragmentation (Mbembe Reference Mbembe and Corcoran2019: 27-28). In this context, space is divided as a result of the establishment of internal borders. Russia-sponsored creation of “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic” or its support for independence of Georgian regions of Abkhazia or South Ossetia are examples of this strategy. Creation of borders as one of the manifestations of necropower allows Russia to govern through a ‘panopticon fortification’ by establishing a system of surveillance and dependence within the areas violently taken from Ukraine (Mbembe Reference Mbembe and Corcoran2019: 81). Second characteristic is bulldozing, or demolishing of cities and towns, destruction of the infrastructure, destruction of cultural and political symbols. Infrastructural warfare is critical to Russia’s war, where attacks on civilian hospitals, shops, and apartments have been part of the daily reality of the Ukrainian people. Last but not least is the co-existence of necropolitical power with biopolitical and disciplinary modes of governance, where facing life or death choice, members of the local population are forced into collaboration, re-education, and propaganda activities.
In this context, a key aspect of necropolitics has been its focus on shaping bodies for death by isolating them and destroying their space of living (Purnell Reference Purnell2021). A central notion here is Agamben’s (Reference Agamben2005) figure of homo sacer, the one whose biological life is stripped of any political rights and can be taken without any consequences. Placed outside the law system and in the position of extreme vulnerabilities, entire populations can be reduced to a figure of homo sacer or a state of bare life. They take on the position of the “living dead” (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2003) as their life is not worth anything and can be destroyed. An extreme example of this is a concentration camp, which for Agamben (Reference Agamben2005) was “the place in which the most absolute conditio inhumana ever to appear on Earth was realized”. This politics of causing harm and destruction of human bodies is “the ultimate expression of [state’s] sovereignty”, which resides in the power to decide “who is able to live and who must die” (Mbembe Reference Mbembe and Corcoran2019: 66). “The taboo on murder” becomes the most important power of the ruler, who may decide to substitute the logic of life with the logic of death (Stephenson Reference Stephenson2022).
While necropolitics primarily concerns the mechanisms of physical destruction and injury, its modalities can take different forms (Bargu Reference Bargu2021). Mechanisms of necropolitical power can involve the destruction and reconstruction of space as well as erasure of memories and imposition of new ones (Islekel Reference Islekel2022b). For instance, re-development plans of invaded and destroyed areas in the city function as a power invested in regulating death and dead. Reconstruction of spaces of death and destruction impacts the formation of collective memories (Islekel Reference Islekel2022b). Azerbaijani plans to invest in the “reconstruction” of Nagorno-Karabakh areas (Farhadova Reference Farhadova2025) following its recapture in 2023 or Russia’s plans to rebuild parts of Mariupol (V-Variant 2023) are examples of how necropolitical power affects the space of population that it aims to control. Based on a study of Israeli violence committed against Palestinians, Deprez (Reference Deprez2023) puts forward the idea of visual necropolitics as a system of necropolitical violence that is “sustained and legitimized through methods of visual violence”. Central to it is the restriction on people’s ability to see and on what is allowed to be seen and how. As Deprez (Reference Deprez2023) argues, “violence against sight” is the main constituent of visual necropower. She identifies three practices of visual necropolitics: first, it is the loss of sight by Palestinians as a result of Israeli attacks by rubber bullets. Second, it is control over the way death is presented to or hidden from external audiences, or what is allowed to be seen internationally. Finally, visual necropolitics encompasses the control measures imposed on burials as a way to invisibilize the dead and make them “disappear” without possibilities for mourning (Daher-Nashif Reference Daher-Nashif2021).
While necropolitics and visual necropolitics predominantly center on the politics of physical death and its management, these conceptualizations have their limitations. Although Mbembe’s (Reference Mbembe and Corcoran2019) necropolitics mentions the importance of everyday banal acts as part of the violent system, it largely “occludes the multiple, endless, far-too-common, and often banal or seemingly trivial operations of death-making” (Alphin and Debrix Reference Alphin and Debrix2020). Similarly, while Deprez’s (Reference Deprez2023) visual necropolitics touches upon the broader social consequences of visual violence, it largely focuses on the visibility of human bodies and their treatment. However, necropolitics and its visual components can be helpful in understanding not only physical injury and death and their visibility, but also experiences of subjugation and pain (Thakur Reference Thakur2022). How are acts of space destruction and reconstruction experienced by the population and what role do less visible manifestations of violence play in the necropolitical management of population? As the work of death involves not only the sovereign decision between “who can live and who must die”, it is important to also focus on the structural and systemic conditions that contribute to the implementation of this decision. In this regard, different concepts such as social death (Card Reference Card2003), slow violence (Nixon Reference Nixon2011), or slow death (Berlant Reference Berlant2007) can be helpful to capture the materialization of necropolitics in its different modalities.
Violence and subjugation as a social construction
While the biopolitical turn in political science has allowed to ‘bring the body back into the discussion’, it has primarily focused on “killing bodies” (Alphin and Debrix Reference Alphin and Debrix2020), or the physical manifestation of bio/necropolitical practices. Looking at the subjugation of war combatants to death (Therry Reference Therry2024), mass disappearances and death (Díaz and Freire Reference Díaz and Freire2023), or the management of corpses in the context of war (Leshem Reference Leshem2015), necropolitics has become primarily linked to the physical management and elimination of bodies or their preparation for a “justified” death. The study of death has thus become “sensationalized” by the focus on mass killings, decapitations, rapes, castrations, tortures, and kidnappings (Misra Reference Misra2018). However, disciplines from political philosophy to anthropology have long noticed that “violence can never be understood solely in terms of its physicality – force, assault, or the infliction of pain – alone” (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois Reference Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois2004). French philosopher Catherine Malabou (Reference Malabou2016) has called attention to this problem of theorizations where bare life is typically reduced to a state of biological existence. In his original ideas, Agamben (Reference Agamben2005) argued that “Bare life … now dwells in the biological body”. This reflection, as Malabou notes, contends that bare life is only part of what constitutes the biological body. This approach echoes Claudia Card’s (Reference Card2003) reflections on the violence of genocide, where social death as the disruption of social links, destruction of identities and identifications is considered to be central to the infliction of pain on human beings.
If we think about violence not only in terms of physical destruction, but as a set of practices that produces certain subjects, then we understand violence not just as a phenomenon happening beyond the borders of the social contract, but also as an act of producing, reshaping, and changing certain bodies and identities (Kaku Reference Kaku2024). In this context, the ideas of slow violence (Nixon Reference Nixon2011) and slow death (Berlant Reference Berlant2007) are particularly relevant. Both of them aim to shed light on the mundane, less visible manifestations of violence. They propose to think about sovereignty as a relation between personal and political (Berlant Reference Berlant2007: 754-755). While slow death focuses on “the presentness of ordinariness”, slow violence stresses the importance of registering violence that “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (Nixon Reference Nixon2011: 2; Berlant Reference Berlant2007: 759). This thinking about death-making allows to capture not only its physical manifestations, such as killings and death that dominate the study of wars and occupation, but also everyday dynamics of violence. Writing about the space of slow death, Berlant (Reference Berlant2007) notes, that “people do live in it, just not very well”. In this vein, rather than showcasing the immediate effects of material and physical destruction, slow violence emphasizes “long-term forms of harm” (Davies Reference Davies2018). These contributions to the study of violence highlight its social nature and embeddedness in an everyday experience (Schmidt and Schröder Reference Schmidt2021). In focusing on physical destructions and killings, this approach has emphasized the symbolic, cultural, and metaphorical dimensions of death (Engelke Reference Engelke2019). Rather than engaging with philosophical reflections on the meaning of death, it focuses on “practical realities and dilemmas”, looking at it as a site of struggle and resistance at the same time (Scheper-Hughes Reference Scheper-Hughes1992).
This thinking about human body as a social phenomenon can be extrapolated to (visual) necropolitics. From this perspective, the necropolitical calculus can function in systematic, structural, and patterned ways in which necropolitics is expressed not in physical death, but in the repression of people’s conduct and their lived environment. As humans against whom violence is perpetrated are not mere biological bodies, their positionalities are simultaneously political and social, “constituted in reference to historical political conditions” and other groups and communities (Wilcox Reference Wilcox2015: 3). Consequently, “spaces of death” (Taussig Reference Taussig1984) are shaped not only by the killings of bodies, but also by the imposition of new forms and meanings upon them and the creation of a new regime of visuality. For example, stripping humans of their social, linguistic, cultural characteristics has a necropolitical dynamics at play. Similarly, imposing rules on the funeral procedures or preventing relatives from burying the dead is also a necropolitical act. It is manifested not through the physical killing of a human but through the destruction of their social body and its neglect. As Roche (Reference Roche2022: 41) has put it: it is not only “the governing of death, but also governing through death”. In this context, mass conscriptions of the Russian soldiers into the army can be regarded as necropolitical practices associated with the cult of death and its normalization (see Therry Reference Therry2024). However, managing the death itself as a “cultural and social practice” or “re-education” programs for (kidnapped) Ukrainian children is also necropolitical (Deprez Reference Deprez2023; Khoshnood et al. Reference Khoshnood, Raymond and Howarth2023). The death-making power creates a state of exception where individuals or groups of populations become stripped of their rights, while continuing forms of domination, subjugation, and violence additionally materialize in cultural, symbolic, material, and linguistic practices imposed by the occupying force. Those practices help sustain a new order and contribute to the condition where Ukrainians are forced to remain in suspended states of exception. This new order does not only eliminate Others, or those who disagree, but also fundamentally reshapes people’s lives, influenced by new symbolic and memory politics and propaganda campaigns. It renders (groups of) population disposable forcing them to fight for their physical, economic, and social survival (Bargu Reference Bargu2016).
In sum, while necropolitics is informative for understanding life as monopolized by death, its modalities can vary. Beyond the immediate elimination of human lives via bombing, tortures and physical violence, necropolitics of war – in this case, Russian (visual) necropolitics – further extends to the conditions that are conducive to death-worlds in their physical and social sense. When it comes to different types of violence, this continuum of necropolitical modalities is also co-existent with the biopolitical logic of governance. By eliminating some lives and ways of being, the Russian state simultaneously deploys biopolitical discursive strategies. For instance, while deporting Ukrainian children, it aims to project the image of protecting their lives. However, these practices are also necropolitical as they aim to strip people of their social, national, cultural identities.
Methodology
There is a growing acceptance in IR and political science that images can speak and tell, just like text (Bleiker Reference Bleiker2018; Reference Bleiker2001). Therefore, how certain events are constructed depends on what Mirzoeff (Reference Mirzoeff2011) calls the politics of visual rights, or the right of some to look, see, and be seen, as well as denial of this right to others. This ‘right to look’ is related to the ‘invention of the other’, where the latter is deprived of their right to be seen and to see. It is by claiming this particular right that one is denied that the Other enacts their subjectification. In the study of closed violent contexts such as occupied zones of Ukraine, what role do existing visual images play? Who has the right to look and be seen on those images? And whose rights and representations are being concealed? In the context of the war on Ukraine, it is Russia’s claimed right to look and its implications that is in the main focus of this study.
With regards to the study of biopolitics and necropolitics, visual aspects of both “remain a terra incognita” in political science (Makarychev and Medvedev Reference Makarychev and Medvedev2024). The term “visual biopolitics” first appeared in 2022 in parallel in a book by Fatimah Rony and in a special issue in the Journal of Illiberalism Studies. In her book, Fatimah Rony (Reference Rony2022) defined the goal of visual biopolitics in determining “who can be visualized and who can’t, and how they are visualized, who has subjectivity and [of] what kind (and thus what can happen to them), and for what purposes”. The special issue, in turn, looked specifically at how signs, images, and symbols produce key biopolitical concepts, such as sovereignty, biopower etc (Makarychev Reference Makarychev2021; Kurnyshova and Makarychev Reference Kurnyshova and Makarychev2023). In turn, Deprez’s (Reference Deprez2023) concept of visual necropolitics points to the importance of visuality in enacting violence, prolonging occupation, and making violent actions ‘invisible’. It highlights that violence finds its expression not only in its physical modality, but also through the imposition of a certain regime of visuality, which renders certain subjects “visible, invisible, or visible in particular ways” (Andersen, Vuori, Mutlu Reference Andersen, Vuori, Mutlu, Aradau, Huysmans, Neal and Voelkner2015).
Focusing on the visual aspects of necropolitical violence inflicted by Russia onto Ukraine, the methodological approach of this article is rooted in the visual analysis traditions of thinking about “the social and the aesthetic” (Rose Reference Rose2016). Taken from the work of Gillian Rose (Reference Rose2016), it relies on visual social semiotics as an analytical vocabulary for describing how regimes of visuality produce the reality in a certain way and the manners in which this can be resisted. This methodological approach is rooted in interpretivism in that it sheds light on how specific situations shape meanings, impose views on reality, or invisibilize and distort some aspects of it. These meanings are relational and can be interpreted differently by various actors. For example, the demolition of Lenin monuments in Ukraine is seen as a way to the country’s post-Soviet emancipation and decolonization. The same process is viewed in a hostile way in Russia as a way to break ties with it.
In terms of data collection, this article covers the period between 2022 and the summer of 2024. It includes three types of data. First, annual reports and findings of international human rights organisations were analysed to capture the different types of violence in the context of Russia’s war on Ukraine. This includes reports by Amnesty International (2022, 2024), Human Rights Watch (HRW 2024), as well as a report with the stories of witnesses and survivors of Russia’s aggression (Tatokhina Reference Tatokhina2024). Such an experience-centered approach allowed for the identification of the key features and main modalities of Russia’s necropolitical violence and the violent regimes of visuality linked to it. Second, the article includes news related to the developments in the occupied regions of Ukraine, collected from Ukrainian sources, such as Ukrainer, Noviny Donbasu, Volnovakha City, V-Variant, and Suspilne. It also includes visual representations from occupied areas, such as Mariupol, from Russian media Meduza (2023). The sources were selected based on their coverage of the situation in the occupied regions of Ukraine. As information about occupied zones remains scarce, visual data, such as photos and videos, as well as interviews found in newspapers complemented human rights reports. Finally, social media accounts, such as X (former Twitter) and Facebook, of the organizations like HRW and Ukrainer, among others, were included.
When it comes to data analysis (Patton Reference Patton2002), it took place in three steps. First, after identifying the main types of data relevant for the analysis, visual images and news were collected. This selection was guided by “sampling by time” and “sampling by theme” principles (see Androutsopoulos Reference Androutsopoulos, Mallinson, Childs and Van Herk2017). ‘Sampling by time’ refers to the focus on the visual images and news published during the specified period, between 2022 and 2024. ‘Sampling by theme’ is related to the collection of materials dedicated to the situation in the Ukrainian regions occupied by Russia. Therefore, images and updates produced about developments in Ukraine-controlled regions or policies of external actors were not included in the sample. Different manifestations of visuality of Russia’s necropolitical violence were analysed and grouped into two prominent modalities: manipulation of representations and the forceful imposition of a different identity. These two modalities were inductively identified during the data analysis stage. They do not necessarily capture all possible instances of violence and their manifestations. The latter would have required employing quantitative software-assisted approaches and having access to a much greater number of sources, which is not given under the present circumstances on the occupied territories. Hence, it is beyond the scope of this article to comprehensively grasp the entirety of instances of violence or develop their typology. Instead, the article deliberately relies on an inductive, smaller-scale qualitative analysis, thus emphasizing the importance of context and “ways of seeing which are socially and historically specific” (Hand Reference Hand, Sloan and Haase2017). Due to space limitation, a number of examples were chosen to illustrate how those two modalities of Russia’s visual necropolitics materialise in the context of its policies in the occupied zones of Ukraine.
Manipulation of representations
The main aim of representations manipulation is to picture life under Russian occupation as a space of peace and new life. This is done by visibilizing certain representations and erasing others. The images presented to the public get new layers of meanings constructed with the aim to signal the end of the “previous order” and the perpetuation of a new one.
This end, or destruction exists not only in the form of elimination, but also performative re-building. As noted earlier, visual necropolitics and its social dimensions shed light on the “system of visual violence” that enables necropolitical power (Deprez Reference Deprez2023). In this regard, philosopher Ege Selin Islekel (Reference Islekel2022b) points out that “building the spaces of destruction anew is a key element of death work”. Accordingly, necropolitical power can also manifest itself through the forceful imposition of a new symbolic order. Its visual dimension refers not only to “who is allowed to look and see”, but “what is shown and how”. For example, in the aftermath of the siege of Mariupol, 90% of the city was reportedly destroyed. While under occupation, the Russian media tried to produce the image of a “re-built city”, by posting photos of several new constructions, such as on Image 1. By selectively showing several buildings, these representations aim to present a “new life” in Mariupol and reassert its incorporation into the Russian state. The image of a woman dressed in the colours of the Russian flag on one of the buildings demonstrates that the necropolitical aim of managing death is intertwined with the mnemonic, cultural, and spatial re-organization (Islekel Reference Islekel2022b). This visual regime symbolizes not so much the new order as the symbolic death of the previous one.
Image 1. Mariupol under occupation. Source: Meduza 2023.
Another example is a change of road signs in the occupied towns and cities. Image 2 demonstrates the road sign of Volnovakha under occupation (Volnovakha City 2022). While the place remained in ruins as a consequence of Russian attacks, the yellow-blue flag of Ukraine on the road sign was replaced by the Russian flag as one of the first decisions of the occupation administration. The earlier mentioned change of the Ukrainian letter “i” with a Russian “и” on the entry road sign in Mariupol is also a representation of “political battles as being fought within the visual and imaginary fields” (Makarychev Reference Makarychev2021: 58). As such, these acts of non-systemic “rebuilding” and changes are performative in that they “do not so much reflect as produce reality and that have ontological effects through multiple reiterations” (Makarychev Reference Makarychev2021).
Image 2. Volnovakha under occupation. Source: Volnovakha City.
A form of representation manipulation is also attempts at the erasure of evidence of violence by imposing control over who can be buried and who cannot. Dead bodies constitute spaces where contestation over meanings takes place (Auchter Reference Auchter2021; Leshem Reference Leshem2015; Verdery Reference Verdery1999). They are used and manipulated to shape global politics by humanizing and visibilising some and dehumanizing and invisibilising others (Auchter Reference Auchter2021). In the context of war, dead bodies are as much a horrifying result of hostilities and tortures as symbols of different political orders, which compete against each other (Puar Reference Puar2005). Katherine Verdery (Reference Verdery1999: 28) argues that “a dead body is meaningful not in itself but through culturally established relations to death and through the way a specific dead person’s importance is constructed”. Through dead bodies and their management political ideas and power materialise. As Daher-Nashif (Reference Daher-Nashif2018: 1) argued:
Necropolitics in this case is not only the decision about who deserves to live and who deserves death but also the decision about the structure of the dead body’s time-space, about its social-political and biological death. It’s about allowing or disallowing burial, grief, and bereavement.
One example of visual control over death is the fate of two Ukrainian teenagers Tihran Ohanissyan and Mikita Hahanov, killed in occupied Berdiansk. 16-year old Tihran and Mikita stayed in Berdiansk during Russia’s occupation. Reportedly, the teenagers were active participants of anti-Russian communities and faced many threats from the occupant forces. In 2023, the teenagers were shot dead. Commenting on their death, Russian media reported about the “liquidation of pro-Ukrainian terrorists” (PravdaUA 2022). For more than a year, relatives of the teenagers have not been allowed to bury the bodies. Some reports claimed plans to have a secret burial. This case – one among many – points to the attempts to prevent showing victims of aggression and remembering them by not allowing access to the bodies.
By regulating who can be buried and who cannot, Russian forces control the visual politics of death, deciding on how funerals and grief take place (OHCHR 2023). At the start of Russian invasion of Izyum where mass atrocities were committed, Ukrainians were reportedly self-organizing burials of the dead, often next to their places of living, marking the graves with names or numbers (Suspilne Noviny Reference Noviny2022). However, under occupation, as in the case of Tihran and Mikita, Russians did not allow the burials to happen and carried them out themselves. In the occupied city of Mariupol, Russians reportedly exhumated the bodies from the houses and adjacent areas and took them away, not allowing for a proper burial (UkrPravda 2022). Cemeteries, burial places, and the funerals play an important role in the construction of national identity and in national remembrance (Turnbull Reference Turnbull, Fforde, Hubert and Turnbull2002). They can also be powerful places of resistance (Leshem Reference Leshem2015). Therefore, control over dead bodies and death becomes a way to control the population. De Leon (Reference De Leon2015) termed the “violence performed and produced through the specific treatment of corpses” as necroviolence.
In this sense, it is important to further consider the relation between visuality and death, in order to analyse how visual necropolitics manifests itself beyond “the right to look” and see. Rather, it is a central element in manipulating representations by creating new ones or erasing others. Accordingly, necropolitical management of visualities includes not only “who must die”, in Mbembe’s (Reference Mbembe2003) conceptualization, but also who and what has the right to be seen and how. It means that the death worlds contain not only the elimination of physical life, but also the re-shaping, distorting, re-forming, or erasing symbolic life and identity. Here, life is seen not as a biological characteristic only, but as a “work of art” embedded into broader social, cultural, and political structures (Malabou Reference Malabou2016). According to Catherine Malabou (Reference Malabou2016), this “symbolic life is that what exceeds biological life”.
In sum, while the necropolitical power attempts to maximize the physical death, its modalities can vary, from killings to prohibitions of proper burials and the destruction of bodies. The necropolitical spaces, or death-worlds, contain social, historical, cultural signifiers, whose elimination is a deadly affair in itself. Accordingly, visual necropolitics works not only as a regulator of what is allowed to be seen, but re-shapes and re-forms it via necropolitical methods. However, even in such circumstances, death-worlds as necropolitical spaces include alternative visions and views, albeit hidden, that can challenge the visual necropower. In particular, reports from the de-occupied zones of Ukraine show people’s attempts to preserve the national symbols and representations. For example, after de-occupation of some areas of the Kharkiv region, local residents showed the Ukrainian flags that they had buried in glass jars in order to protect them (Suspilne 2022).
Forceful imposition of a different identity
Unlike representations manipulation, forceful imposition of a different identity entails the power of the sovereign in defining visibility of certain bodies and characteristics and invisibility of others (Deprez Reference Deprez2023). While necropolitics primarily focuses on the infliction of death and pain, it extends to “the mundane” and looks into how the subjects “marked for death fold into life” (Islekel Reference Islekel2022a). Accordingly, the violent dynamics can take the form of forceful re-shaping and re-production of the subjects (Wright Reference Wright2011). This transformation can be seen as a modality of visual necropolitics, which defines not only who is allowed to be seen, but what kind of a subject is allowed to exist and how it is reshaped.
A notable case of such violent re-shaping of bodies is necropolitics of (re)education. Since 2022, around 20,000 Ukrainian children in the occupied areas have been kidnapped by the Russian forces, and around a million continue to live under occupation in Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk and other regions (Russia’s war on children 2024). In some cases, entire orphanages in Ukraine were moved to Russia-controlled areas. Many children were relocated, separated from their parents and given new names (Walker Reference Walker2024). Deportations are framed in biopolitical terms, as an attempt to protect civilian population from the war. Programs of “Re-education” for Ukrainian kids are organized at camps called “University Shifts”, which operate with the support of Russia’s Ministry of Education and Science (Center Coop 2022). An integral aspect of the practice of “re-education” is the destructive violence with the primary goal of “assimilation, homogenization, and conformity” (Nagengast Reference Nagengast1994: 109). Its operation is entangled with the production of death, where necropolitical power functions by “purifying” and “normalizing” the population (Foucault Reference Foucault, Bertani, Fontana, Ewald and Macey2003). Under occupation, children are indoctrinated with anti-Ukrainian propaganda, there are strict restrictions on the use of the Ukrainian language. Military training is a compulsory part of the curriculum (Barbieri Reference Barbieri2023). Most “re-education” camps have a religious component, with children having Russian Orthodoxy classes regardless of their initial religious views. Pupils at schools must learn and sing the Russian anthem and write letters of support for the Russian soldiers (BBC 2024). Around 41 summer camps across Russia, Belarus, and the occupied territories of Ukraine function to this purpose (Khoshnood et al. Reference Khoshnood, Raymond and Howarth2023). Some of these camps are shown on the Russia TV, with the Ukrainian children forced to give interviews and praise the conditions there. Certainly, violent aspects of education are not inherent to authoritarian regimes or wars and occupations only. In her book about the US education, Boni Wozolek (Reference Wozolek2023) sheds light on its necropolitical aspect as “the capacity for schools to dictate to what degree minoritized students’ ways of being can remain intact”. Thus, it refers to the racial, gender, and sexual discrimination encountered by students. While any system of education entails violence, my case is different in that these children are kidnapped and forcefully placed into the camps for “re-education”.
As a necropolitical practice, “re-education” also imposes a new violent regime of visuality. Within this context, a totally new reality is created at an everyday level, with new symbols, new textbooks, new narratives propagated on TV and by the new authorities. Image 3 captures the violent regime of visuality. The picture was taken during the new school year celebration in occupied Mariupol in 2022. The events took place half a year into the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion and three months since the city’s occupation. The celebration was marked by the creation of new symbolic reality. The Russian flag was installed in the school’s yard. Children were given balloons with the same colors. The military personnel attended the event with the uniforms marked with “Z”, the symbol of Russian military campaign. This atmosphere of terror is as much a psychological phenomenon as cultural and social (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois Reference Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois2004). The imposed social reality disrupted the previous relationships, contemporary and intergenerational, that shaped the meanings and identities for these children. The classes taught included narratives of dehumanization and demonization of the previous life under the Ukrainian control.
Image 3. The start of a new school year in occupied Mariupol, 1 September 2022. Source: Noviny Donbasu.
Attempts at imposing a new identity can also be found in the new celebratory practices. Image 4 depicts kindergarten children from the village of Botievo, celebrating the Russia Day in 2023. During the celebration, educators were dressed up in traditional Russian clothes. Carrying Russian flags, kids had to listen to the Russian anthem. These activities aim to make children part of Russian cultural space from an early age and foster their identification with the Russian state. This new regime of visuality is necropolitical in that it dictates not only “who is allowed to live or die” but also what type of subject is not allowed to live – namely, the subject with a Ukrainian identity. “Re-education” thus functions by implementing concrete measures to radically transform the subjects, break up communities, destroy social and cultural connections that underpin them. The bodies who are “allowed to live” are expected to adopt new identity patterns and express their loyalty and belonging to the Russian state. The consequences of such processes can already be seen on some examples from the regions of Ukraine occupied since 2014. There, a number of Ukrainians, including teenagers, were mobilised in 2022 to fight against the Ukrainian forces. Disobedience bears severe life risks. For instance, there are reports about mass persecution of the Ukrainian language in the occupied territories.
Image 4. Children in the occupied Botievo. Source: Ukrainer 2024.
In occupied Melitopol, for instance, Russian forces punished a student who spoke Ukrainian in school by driving him dozens of kilometers with a bag over his head to a remote area and abandoning him to walk back home alone (HRW 2024b). While some acts do not necessarily – albeit often – lead to a physical death, they are necropolitical in that people under occupation end up in a state of being where they are “trapped in the process of becoming cavaders”, forced to accept new conditions, or even go to war against their state, Ukraine (Misra Reference Misra2018). While imposing a new cultural and linguistic identity, Russian necropolitical practices also include the re-shaping of the ethnic composition of some territories. Amnesty International (2024) has widely reported mass deportations of Crimean Tatars from the peninsula, annexed in 2014, and the transfer of the ethnic Russian population in.
Despite mass violence, clandestine attempts at resisting the forceful imposition of a new identity persist. Reportedly, students from occupied areas continue joining online classes organised by Ukrainian universities. The finding from the fieldwork by Jade McGlynn (Reference McGlynn2024) show that many of these students are reluctant to have separate classes organised for them. Instead, they prefer to attend the general classes to maintain their connection to the Ukrainian community. Some teachers, who fled occupation, continue to give classes to their pupils and students who stayed in the territories under Russian control. In 2024, BBC reported a story of a teacher from Mariupol who organised online teaching for her students staying under occupation. In an interview (BBC 2024), she explained:
It’s not so important to teach children what year Taras Shevchenko [a famous Ukrainian poet] was born, or the rules of geometry, but to keep them connected with Ukrainian culture.
In sum, forceful imposition of a new identity constitutes another modality of visual necropolitics. It manifests itself not only in the mass persecution and violence against pro-Ukrainian activists, but also in the creation of a new regime of visuality which attempts to erase the previous order.
Conclusion
This article has brought together works on necropolitics, visual necropolitics (Deprez Reference Deprez2023; Mbembe Reference Mbembe2003; Reference Mbembe and Corcoran2019) and perspectives on everyday violence and subjugation (Nixon Reference Nixon2011; Berlant Reference Berlant2007; Card Reference Card2003), to interrogate experiences of Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine. Taking as a starting point necropolitics as “the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die”, it shows that the death-making capacity can manifest itself in a variety of forms and modalities. Looking into the developments in the Russia-occupied regions of Ukraine, the central idea of this article is that physical extermination by the invading forces goes in parallel with the practices of social death. Drawing on visual semiotic analysis of social media channels, this article identified and explored two modalities or forms of visual necropolitics, which create a new violent regime of visuality and attempt to erase the previous order – namely, the manipulation of representations and the forceful imposition of a new identity. While more research is needed to examine the prevalence and materialization of these two modalities, both of them are aimed at the ultimate denial of Ukraine’s sovereignty and the Ukrainians’ right to exist as an independent political nation, which should be seen in a broader context of Russia’s increasingly assertive and confrontational stance towards the “post-Soviet” space and internationally (see Mälksoo Reference Mälksoo2022).
Centered on the ontological and epistemological conditions of necropolitics, the key contribution of this article lies in a further conceptual and empirical development of visual necropolitics. Conceptually, initially coined as control over “what can be seen” in the context of occupied territories of Palestine, visual necropolitics prioritized the materiality of physical body and its external perceptions. Adding insights from everyday violence and subjugation, this article discussed visual necropolitics as a bodily and social experience in the context of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Thus, it is not only “who is allowed to be seen”, but also “what kind of a subject is getting produced” and “what is shown” that constitutes part of the necropolitics of war. In doing so, it has discussed the visual necropolitics under occupation as a process of both killing and re-shaping people’s lives, thereby “whistling away what it means to be human” (Misra Reference Misra2018). This is important for understanding not only the constitutive architecture of violence, but also the everyday processes that underpin it and re-shape the occupied zones. In other words, visual necropolitics of occupation can be read as a process where certain groups are both framed as ‘killable’ and become exposed to “the power of death-in-life” (Davies Reference Davies2018). While the studies of war are often dominated by the discussion of great power competition and geopolitics, focus on visual necropolitics and its conceptualization as both a physical and social experience is also important for visualizing prospects of peace in the region, where cessation of physical hostilities is only part of the process. As in other contexts, such as 2014 annexation of Crimea or the 2008 Russo-Georgian war and its aftermath, Russian intervention and violence come in several ways, and local communities experience it not only as a physical warfare, but also become exposed to slow violence that aims to alter their identity, language, social and cultural space.
Physical violence and its everyday, perhaps less visible, manifestations co-exist in war-torn, conflict-ridden environments. In focusing on the necropolitics of war, the article contributes to the nascent literature on the bodily experiences of Russia’s war on Ukraine and its everyday manifestations (Tsymbalyuk Reference Tsymbalyuk2023; Makarychev and Medvedev Reference Makarychev and Medvedev2024). By shifting attention away from the political calculus and rationale, it has focused on more “mundane, perhaps banal, and often ordinary modalities of violence perpetrated against human lives and bodies, and often contributing to horrific instances of death and destruction” (Alphin and Debrix Reference Alphin and Debrix2020). The quick changes imposed onto the residents of occupied regions – in the form of replacement of a national symbol or control over funerals – run in parallel to the destruction of infrastructure and extra-judicial killings and tortures (Amnesty International 2022; Lewis Reference Lewis2025). The manipulation of representations under occupation comes forward as a death-making practice in that it erases and silences local experiences and disrupts the existing social networks and patterns of remembering. In addition, the forceful imposition of a new identity, especially on children, creates a new hegemonic regime of visuality, which aims to bring individuals into a new cultural and symbolic space. The insights of this article are relevant beyond the studied context: looking at other wars, such as between Armenia and Azerbaijan, or authoritarian regimes like in Belarus, Russia, or Iran, it is important to draw attention to the mundane, less visible practices of violence. As access to such contexts for researchers becomes more complicated, if possible at all, it raises additional methodological and ethical choices related to the study of violence and ways to talk about it. In a situation of severe limitations on the freedom of speech, this article proposed visual method of analysis as one possible way to study closed contexts. While expanding on the notions of necropolitics and visual necropolitics of war and occupation, this article has some limitations. First, relying on the reports from human rights organisations and media, it has identified two modalities of visual necropolitics – namely, manipulation of representations and a forceful imposition of a new identity. However, a more systematic and broader analysis of the visuality and violence in the context of war could bring into focus other forms and modalities of Russia’s practices. Thus, while I focused on two central forms of visual necropolitics, this article does not claim to have created a comprehensive typology of violent visualities in times of war. As the reports from the occupied zones are rather limited and the war continues, this article has likely omitted other forms of violent practices and representations, which might be even more significant. As more information is coming from the de-occupied zones and from the places of occupation, other forms and modalities of visual necropolitics might be further identified. Second limitation is related to lack of access to the field and consequent sampling of data from social media. Online visual analysis implies that certain offline policies and behaviour remained beyond the attention of this research. Finally, while the primary focus of this article has been on different manifestations of violence, it is important to acknowledge that a hidden repertoire of resistance continues to exist under occupation (Martsenyuk et al. Reference Martsenyuk, Gugushvili, Ersanilli and Präg2024; Kudlenko Reference Kudlenko2023, on resistance see also Kaku Reference Kaku2023). For example, prohibitions of organizing proper burial are often counteracted by clandestine funerals. Mass propaganda and indoctrination at schools exists in parallel to underground and online classes organized by Ukrainian activists.
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to Vera Axyonova, Tim Haesebrouck, and Fabienne Bossuyt for their valuable feedback on the earlier drafts of this article. I am also very thankful to the editors and two anonymous reviewers for the generous and helpful feedback which helped improve this research.
Financial support
This work was supported by the Flemish Research Foundation (FWO) under grant number 3F016721.
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