It is remarkable how death has loomed so large in the social sciences over the past couple of decades. From mangled bodies to mediated mass killings, from the medicalisation of dying to the ‘snuff’ movies of hardcore porn: death obsesses the sociological imagination.

If among students of society, death has become an immensely fashionable topic, its broader social consequences remain, oddly, a largely ivory-tower affair. For example, whilst post-structuralist and postmodern studies of human mortality stylishly dispatch death to the remote and abstract shores of Otherness, many have remained remarkably silent on the destructiveness arising from today’s techno-industrialisation of war and the globalisation of terrorism.