What you’ve written sets up a really sharp contrast—scarcity-thinking as not just a matter of material limits but as a form of governance that disarms imagination. The way you then link it to Mbembe and Agamben emphasizes two different dimensions of this disciplining:

• Mbembe / deathscapes: scarcity becomes a terrain of managed exposure to harm, where resources are withheld in ways that gradually wear down populations. This isn’t just about absence but about an active politics of distribution that produces zones where survival is precarious.

• Agamben / null-spaces: scarcity disciplines movements into conditions of indeterminacy, where categories like “life” and “law” lose their protective clarity. Scarcity as a juridico-political tactic collapses mediation, leaving people in a condition where they can be acted upon without recourse—life stripped bare before power.

This gives you a layered way of saying: austerity isn’t just economic restraint, it’s a production of deathscapes and null-spaces that enforce a horizon of impossibility.

Austerity is not merely an economic posture but a mode of discipline, a pedagogy of scarcity. It trains movements to imagine within the narrowest possible frame, to internalize the logic that resources are always absent, that horizons must always be clipped. What looks like fiscal restraint is in fact a technology of enclosure: it curtails political imagination, forcing movements to scavenge within a desert rather than build a world.

Seen through Mbembe, this is the manufacture of deathscapes—zones where populations are not simply abandoned but actively configured for premature exhaustion. Scarcity does not just happen; it is imposed, cultivated, made durable. It becomes a terrain where deprivation itself is the architecture of governance, and survival is never secured but always provisional.

Agamben shows us the other side: austerity’s scarcity-thinking generates null-spaces, those juridical voids where distinctions collapse—between bios and zoē, law and life, polis and bare existence. These are not empty places but indeterminate ones, where mediation is stripped away and power can act without limit. Austerity disciplines movements into precisely this void: a condition where their defences are dissolved, where they are rendered governable by being reduced to life without political purchase.

In this light, austerity appears not as prudence but as necropolitics by other means, a thinning out of the very space in which resistance could take form.