Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 2 Issue 1 | Page 43

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death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply,
political death, expulsion, rejection and so on.3
Implicitly, political killings encompass both corporeal and psychological execution
exercised through diverse means such as murder, manslaughter, genocide, social
ostracism and exposure to deadly environments. Foucault shows the importance of
racism in such killings – ‘a power that has the right of life and death, wishes to work
with the instruments, mechanism, and technology of normalization’, and asserts that
it is ‘racism’ which is the ‘indispensable pre-condition’ for exercising ‘the right to kill’.4
This article examines political killings prompted by racism and interrogates the ways
and means by which these murders are actualised and rationalised, but ultimately
rendered invisible. It refers to So