In light of multiple crises at a planetary scale, the uneven distribution of survival prospects has increasingly moved into the focus of public and academic debate. While works on biopolitics have long scrutinized the governing and control of life, scholarly attention is increasingly shifting towards necropolitics, i.e. state-supported policies that systematically kill or let die. This theme issue addresses the question of how such forms of necropolitics are linked to the spatial manifestation of unequal conditions of survival. It asks which rationalities, power relations, and social structures lead to premature death and how these conditions are spatially manifested. The contributions engage with a range of issues from borders, war, and diseases to urban governance, gender, and ecology, analysing the killing and letting die of both human and non-human lives. In thus outlining the contours of a necrogeography, the theme issue seeks to strengthen within social geography a power-sensitive perspective on killing and letting die.