Theorizing Mortal Systemic Exclusion: Homeless Services Bureaucracy as a Necropolitical Complex

• In Event: Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 18: Homelessness

Abstract

Though Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe only mentions homelessness once tangentially, the book describing the increasing tendency of systems of power to render masses of humanity superfluous and disposable is highly relevant to the study of homelessness. This paper tests its theoretical framework to explain homelessness policy and why mere service delivery is not a solution to homelessness. The framework explains why service delivery tends to be tied to criminalization and control and why the unhoused mortality crisis persists and deepens despite increased public funding for homeless services. The paper applies the theory’s major concepts of territorialization, sovereignty, and instrumentalization to homelessness policy. It also discusses the sub-themes of “social voids,” “algorithmic epistemology,” bureaucratic rationality, power-knowledge, and emergent political subjectivities and strategies of poor-people-led social movements under conditions of insurgent survival. Using the City of Oakland’s homelessness response as a case study, its methods include urban geography, review of City and NGO policy documents, institutional analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork in local encampments from 2021 through 2025. The paper finds that the spatial, legal, discursive and institutional fields governing state homelessness response are structured as a necropolitical complex, leading to the creation of social voids or “death zones” and an escalating unhoused mortality crisis. An effective homelessness response requires a process of communicative rationalization that includes the unhoused population and recognizes their inherent agency and humanity rather than a process of instrumental rationalization of service delivery that objectifies them. It must also recognize the primordial act of material dispossession that is the precondition of the necessity of service delivery and embrace fundamental economic reform that realizes land, housing and healthcare as universally accessible public goods. The paper ultimately goes beyond the description of necropolitical elimination of the unhoused to discuss the strengthening of the social movement for their rights and self determination.

Author

• Armando Solorzano, UC Berkeley