Abstract: Two decades into the twenty-first century, a panoply of formerly disparate movements, interests, and organizations have converged around shared anxieties about the future of life on earth. We chronicle an implicit logic emergent in these corners, one that organizes mass public sacrifice to potentiate futures. We refer to this logic as sacropolitics. Sacropolitis describes a practice-oriented reimagining of crisis-oriented politics across the world. Sacrpolitics draws on multiple, dispersed, decentralized sources of energy and impetus and has emerged in a period of great turbulence and acrimony in a highly fractured public sphere, where the very notion of truth is up for grabs. Despite its ambiguity, sacropolitics offers a range of related, collectively generated intimations or snapshots of what the future holds, and all that it may take to get there. 

Bio: Adeem Suhail is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Franklin and Marshall College. His research addresses issues in the anthropology of violence, social theory, and urban studies. His current project, Machines of Violent Desire, interrogates how non-state violence abets transnational projects of order-making in urban South Asia. He is concurrently working on a conceptual project titled Sacropolitics, which theorizes how human communities confront emergent ecological and political crises across the globe through a politics of repair and rejuvenation through mass sacrifice.