Necropolitics

Introduction

Necropolitics is a concept developed by Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe to describe contemporary politics’ ultimate expression of sovereignty: the power to dictate who may live and who must die. While Michel Foucault argued that modern power operates primarily through “making live” (biopolitics), Mbembe contends that in colonial and postcolonial contexts, sovereignty is most fundamentally exercised through creating “death-worlds”—zones where populations are systematically exposed to death, injury, and precarity.

Mbembe’s 2003 essay “Necropolitics” challenged Foucault’s Eurocentric focus on life-administering biopower, arguing it inadequately captures how power operates in much of the world. In Palestine, South Africa under apartheid, contemporary Africa, and zones of contemporary warfare, the primary governmental concern isn’t administering life but managing death. Sovereignty operates through determining conditions under which people can be killed with impunity, creating geographies of maximum violence where life itself is precarious.

Necropolitics illuminates phenomena that biopower struggles to explain: colonial genocide, contemporary drone warfare, police killings of Black people, deaths of migrants at borders, abandonment of populations to pandemic death, and “sacrifice zones” exposed to environmental destruction. It recognizes that for racialized, colonized, and disposable populations, the relationship to power is fundamentally different from the life-administering biopower Foucault described for European welfare states. Understanding necropolitics is essential for analyzing contemporary violence, racism, and the global distributions of life and death.

Key Figures

Related Thinkers:

• Achille Mbembe (1957-present) - Foundational theorist in “Necropolitics” essay (2003)
• Michel Foucault (1926-1984) - Biopolitics and sovereign power
• Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) - Colonial violence and dehumanization
• Giorgio Agamben (1942-present) - State of exception, bare life
• Ruth Wilson Gilmore (1950-present) - Racism as premature death

📖 Essential Reading: Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11-40

Theoretical Foundations

Beyond Foucault: From Biopower to Necropower

Foucault’s biopolitics described power’s transformation from sovereign right to kill toward administration of life. Modern power “makes live and lets die”—operating through health, welfare, and population management rather than spectacular violence. This captured something crucial about European welfare states’ operations.

Yet Mbembe argues this account is provincially European, blind to colonialism’s centrality to modernity. While European citizens experienced biopolitical care, colonized peoples simultaneously faced systematic violence, exploitation, and death. Biopower always had necropolitical underside—the “letting die” or active killing of racialized populations enabling European prosperity.

Necropower—power exercised primarily through death rather than life—isn’t historical relic or deviation from modern power. It’s central to modernity itself, operating alongside and enabling biopower. European life administration required colonial death administration. Contemporary sovereignty continues exercising itself fundamentally through death, especially in postcolonial contexts.

Sovereignty as Right to Kill

Drawing on Carl Schmitt, Georges Bataille, and Hannah Arendt, Mbembe analyzes sovereignty’s foundation in the right to kill. Schmitt argued the sovereign “decides on the exception”—determines when normal law is suspended. Mbembe radicalizes this: the sovereign ultimately decides who can be killed.

This differs from both traditional sovereignty (monarch’s right to execute criminals) and biopower (administering population life). Necropolitical sovereignty creates entire zones of exception where law is permanently suspended, populations are permanently exposed to death, and killing occurs with impunity. These aren’t aberrations but sovereignty’s most fundamental expression.

The suicide bomber exemplifies necropolitical sovereignty’s limit case: asserting sovereignty over one’s own death in context where all life is precarious. When power reserves the right to kill you, killing yourself becomes ultimate sovereignty—refusing power’s right by enacting it yourself.

The Plantation and Colony as Necropolitical Space

Mbembe identifies the plantation and colony as foundational necropolitical spaces. Unlike Foucault’s disciplinary institutions (prison, hospital, school), which optimize life through normalization, plantations organized death. Enslaved people were kept barely alive to extract labor; their deaths were calculated costs; violence was systematic and total.

The plantation combined aspects of the state (territorial control, population management) with capitalism (profit maximization, rationalized production) and total institution (comprehensive control of life). Yet unlike biopolitical institutions that preserve life while normalizing it, the plantation was fundamentally necropolitical—life was maintained only insofar as extraction demanded it; death was constant presence and threat.

Colonialism extended this logic territorially. Colonies were spaces where European law didn’t apply, where violence was unrestricted, where Indigenous peoples could be killed with impunity. Colonial space was permanent state of exception—normal law suspended, population exposed to maximum violence. This wasn’t aberration but colonialism’s essential character.

Occupation and Siege

Contemporary occupation (Palestine, Kashmir, etc.) represents refined necropolitics. Rather than simple military control, occupation creates comprehensive infrastructure of surveillance, fragmentation, and violent management. Territory is divided (settlements, checkpoints, walls), movement restricted, resources controlled, and population exposed to systematic violence.

Mbembe analyzes Israeli occupation of Palestine as paradigmatic necropolitical formation. The occupation creates “splintered geography”—discontinuous territorial fragments preventing Palestinian sovereignty or normal life. Checkpoints control all movement; walls fragment space; settlements establish Israeli territorial claims; military incursions deliver violence.

This isn’t war (two sovereign powers fighting) or biopolitics (administration of life). It’s necropolitics: creating conditions of maximum precarity, where death can arrive anytime, anywhere, from anywhere. Life becomes fundamentally uncertain; long-term planning impossible; normal existence negated. The population isn’t governed to optimize life but managed through exposure to death.

Warfare: From Biopower to Necropower

Contemporary warfare increasingly operates necropolitically. Rather than armies confronting armies (Clausewitzian war), contemporary war targets entire populations, erasing civilian/combatant distinctions. Drone warfare, aerial bombardment, siege warfare, and counterinsurgency treat populations as threats requiring elimination.

Mbembe identifies three necropolitical warfare characteristics:

1. Territorial fragmentation: Destroying coherent space, creating discontinuous zones
2. Vertical sovereignty: Control extends from subterranean to aerial, not just horizontal territory
3. Targeting infrastructure: Destroying hospitals, schools, water, electricity—making life itself impossible

This warfare doesn’t aim to defeat enemy forces but to render territory uninhabitable and population unable to reproduce life. It’s industrialized death-production.

Historical Genealogy

Transatlantic Slavery

Slavery represents modernity’s foundational necropolitics. Enslaved Africans experienced what Orlando Patterson calls “social death”—complete negation of social existence, kinship, and personhood. They were legally dead—non-persons who could be killed, raped, tortured, or sold with impunity.

Yet enslaved people weren’t simply killed but kept alive for labor extraction. This paradoxical status—socially dead yet biologically maintained—exemplifies necropolitics. Life was preserved only for extraction; death was ever-present threat; violence was total. The plantation operated through calculated administration of death.

The Middle Passage exemplified necropolitical calculation. Millions died during transport; their deaths were factored into slaving companies’ profit calculations. Life and death were literally commodified—enslaved people’s value was their sale price minus their maintenance costs and probability of death.

Colonial Genocide

European colonialism systematically destroyed Indigenous populations through genocide (Americas, Australia, Tasmania), exploitation (Congo, rubber plantations), and administrative violence (famines in India, forced labor). Colonizers calculated acceptable death rates; populations were worked to death; resistance was met with extermination.

German colonialism in Namibia (1904-1908) exemplifies this. The Herero and Nama peoples resisted colonization; German forces responded with systematic extermination—driving people into desert, poisoning waterholes, establishing concentration camps. 65,000-100,000 Herero and 10,000 Nama died—75%+ of Herero population. This was necropolitics: sovereign decision that population must die.

British colonialism’s famines—Bengal (1943, 3+ million dead), Ireland (1845-49, 1+ million dead), India repeatedly—represent necropolitical governance. These weren’t natural disasters but policy outcomes. Food was exported while populations starved; relief was withheld or inadequate; officials calculated acceptable death tolls. Churchill reportedly said Indians were “breeding like rabbits” and asked why Gandhi hadn’t died yet. Necropolitics: deliberately letting die.

Apartheid South Africa

Apartheid exemplifies necropolitical sovereignty. Black South Africans faced spatial fragmentation (bantustans), pass laws controlling movement, systematic violence (police, military, death squads), and economic exploitation creating premature death through poverty, disease, and dangerous work.

Mbembe, who grew up under apartheid, describes it as creating Black life as “death-in-life”—technically alive but socially dead, without political rights, subject to arbitrary violence, exposed to premature death. Apartheid sovereignty operated through managing Black populations’ exposure to death while appearing as rational, bureaucratic governance.

Township life exemplified this: overcrowded, under-resourced, heavily policed spaces where life was precarious and death common. Sharpeville Massacre (1960, 69 killed), Soweto Uprising (1976, 176+ killed), and countless other killings demonstrated necropolitical sovereignty—the right to kill with impunity.

The Holocaust

Nazi genocide represents necropolitics’s most systematic expression. Jews, Roma, disabled people, homosexuals, and others were designated for elimination through industrial killing. This combined biopolitical concern with Aryan racial hygiene and necropolitical decision that racialized others must die.

Concentration and extermination camps were necropolitical spaces par excellence—zones where law was suspended, guards could kill at will, and populations were systematically destroyed. Life was maintained temporarily only for labor extraction; death was constant and rationalized.

Agamben analyzes the Muselmann—concentration camp inhabitants reduced to bare biological existence, neither living nor dead. This figure exemplifies necropolitics: life stripped of meaning, reduced to biological persistence awaiting death.

Late Modern Colonialism and Postcolonial Africa

Mbembe analyzes postcolonial African states as necropolitical. Rather than death’s elimination through development, many postcolonial states are characterized by permanent warfare, failing infrastructure, epidemic disease, and mass death from poverty, violence, and abandonment.

This isn’t simple underdevelopment but necropolitical governance resulting from colonialism’s legacies, Cold War proxy wars, structural adjustment, and authoritarian state violence. Populations face systematic exposure to death through:

• Civil wars and ethnic violence
• State violence and paramilitaries
• Economic policies producing starvation and poverty
• Epidemic diseases (HIV/AIDS, malaria, Ebola) where treatment is inadequate
• Resource extraction wars fueling perpetual conflict

Contemporary Necropolitics

Drone Warfare and Targeted Killing

Drone warfare exemplifies contemporary necropolitics. Operators in Nevada or Virginia kill people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, or Somalia through remote strikes. “Targeted killing” claims to eliminate specific threats but frequently kills civilians (“collateral damage”).

This represents several necropolitical features:

• Asymmetric sovereignty: U.S. asserts right to kill anyone, anywhere, without reciprocal vulnerability
• Kill lists: Bureaucratic determination of who may be killed (Terror Tuesdays, signature strikes)
• Expanded battlespace: Entire regions become killable zones outside traditional war
• Necropolitical calculation: Acceptable civilian death ratios, probability thresholds for strikes

Drone operators experience psychological dissociation—killing people thousands of miles away, then driving home to families. The necropolitical decision is made clinically, through algorithm and committee, sanitized of visceral violence yet absolutely deadly.

Police Violence and Anti-Black Necropolitics

Police killings of Black people in the U.S. represent domestic necropolitics. Police exercise necropolitical sovereignty—deciding who lives or dies with legal impunity. Tamir Rice (12 years old, shot within seconds), Breonna Taylor (shot in her home), George Floyd (murdered over nine minutes), Philando Castile (killed during traffic stop)—the list is endless.

This isn’t aberrant police misconduct but necropolitical governance. Police are assigned to manage racialized populations deemed threats to social order. “Reasonable fear” gives officers effective impunity to kill. Qualified immunity shields them from accountability. The

necropolitical sovereign (state) reserves right to kill Black people with minimal consequences.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” Police violence is this necropolitics in action—systematic production of Black vulnerability to death by state agents.

Border Necropolitics

Borders increasingly function as necropolitical zones. Mediterranean crossings kill thousands annually—40,000+ since 2014. U.S.-Mexico border deaths number in thousands. European and U.S. border policies deliberately create deadly conditions while claiming humanitarian concern.

This is necropolitics: sovereign decisions about who may access life (territory, employment, security) and who must die. Borders don’t simply exclude but function as “thanatopolitical machines”—systematically producing death. Militarized enforcement pushes migration through deserts and seas; rescue is criminalized; bodies accumulate.

Family separation, immigration detention, and deportation to violence represent slow necropolitics—not immediate killing but exposure to conditions producing death. Deporting gang violence survivors to El Salvador, refusing asylum to those fleeing climate disasters, detaining migrants in pandemic conditions without healthcare—all exercise necropolitical sovereignty.

Palestinian Life Under Occupation

Israeli occupation of Palestine remains Mbembe’s paradigmatic necropolitical formation. Restrictions on movement (checkpoints, permits, walls), collective punishment (home demolitions, infrastructure destruction), military incursions, and siege warfare (especially Gaza) create comprehensive necropolitical control.

Gaza exemplifies necropolitics. Israeli and Egyptian blockade creates “open-air prison” where 2+ million people face restricted food, medicine, electricity, water, and movement. Periodic military assaults kill thousands. The population lives under permanent precarity where death can arrive from sky anytime.

Palestinians face differential sovereignty: Jewish settlers have full Israeli law protection and can kill Palestinians with minimal consequences; Palestinians face military law, arbitrary detention, and can be killed with impunity. This tiered sovereignty—different rights to life based on identity—is necropolitics.

Slow Death and Organized Abandonment

Lauren Berlant’s “slow death” describes another necropolitical mode: not spectacular violence but systematic exposure to conditions producing premature death. Poverty, toxic environments, inadequate healthcare, dangerous work, and chronic stress slowly kill without dramatic violence.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s “organized abandonment” describes how neoliberal states withdraw from providing life infrastructure for marginalized populations. Flint, Michigan’s lead-poisoned water; Hurricane Katrina abandonment of Black New Orleans residents; closing rural hospitals—these represent necropolitics through abandonment.

This differs from active killing but is equally deadly. Denying Medicaid expansion (killing estimated 15,000+ annually), environmental racism causing cancer clusters, and poverty-induced chronic stress reducing lifespans—all exercise necropolitical sovereignty by organizing vulnerability to premature death.

Pandemic Necropolitics

COVID-19 revealed brutal necropolitics. Who was exposed to virus? Essential workers, disproportionately people of color, who couldn’t work from home. Who died? Elders in understaffed nursing homes, imprisoned people in overcrowded facilities, poor communities lacking healthcare, and racialized populations.

Governments made explicitly necropolitical decisions: which businesses remained open (economy vs. lives), who qualified for protection (residents vs. immigrants), how to allocate scarce ventilators (triage criteria), and whether to implement lockdowns (protecting some while exposing others).

Globally, vaccine apartheid was necropolitical. Wealthy nations hoarded vaccines while Global South nations faced mass death. Patents blocked production; vaccine waste in Global North while Global South lacked basic access. This exemplified necropolitical sovereignty—determining whose life matters, who may die.

Climate Necropolitics

Climate change represents necropolitics at planetary scale. Decisions about emissions, adaptation, and resource allocation determine which populations face displacement, drought, flooding, heat death, and ecological collapse. These aren’t natural disasters but political decisions about acceptable death tolls.

Global South bears worst climate impacts despite minimal responsibility for emissions. This is necropolitical: Global North’s consumption produces death in Global South, yet Global North refuses reparations or adequate adaptation assistance. Pacific islands face submersion; Sahel faces famine; hurricanes devastate Caribbean—all reflect necropolitical decisions about whose lives matter.

“Sacrifice zones”—regions exposed to extreme pollution, extraction, or environmental destruction—exemplify environmental necropolitics. Cancer Alley, Niger Delta oil pollution, Appalachian mountaintop removal, and Pacific plastic gyres represent necropolitical decisions that certain populations and places are expendable.

Critiques and Debates

Relation to Biopolitics

How does necropolitics relate to biopolitics? Are they opposed, complementary, or overlapping? Foucault acknowledged “letting die” in biopolitics but focused on “making live.” Mbembe argues this misses how central death-administration is to modern sovereignty.

Some argue they’re complementary: biopower for privileged populations, necropower for disposable ones. Others suggest they’re phases: colonial necropolitics preceded metropolitan biopolitics, which required colonial death. Still others argue necropolitics is biopolitics’s negation: where biopolitics fails or is withdrawn, necropolitics emerges.

Mbembe suggests they coexist and interact: contemporary sovereignty combines life-administration for some with death-exposure for others. The question isn’t which model applies but how they articulate in specific contexts.

Exceptionalism vs. Structure

Is necropolitics exceptional violence or structural violence? Agamben emphasizes exception—zones where law is suspended. Mbembe emphasizes structure—systematic organization of death as normal governance. This distinction matters politically.

If necropolitics is exceptional, the problem is extending law and rights to excluded populations. If structural, the problem is law and sovereignty themselves, which inherently produce exclusion and death. Reformist politics seeks inclusion; abolitionist politics seeks dismantling necropolitical institutions.

Agency and Resistance

How can subjects resist necropolitics? If populations are reduced to “bare life” or “social death,” is resistance possible? Mbembe identifies suicide bombing as necropolitical agency—asserting sovereignty through self-death when all life is precarious. Critics question whether death can be liberatory.

Other scholars identify alternative resistance: refusal to die, affirmative life-making despite necropolitics, fugitivity (Moten and Harney), marronage (Glissant). Black Lives Matter exemplifies this: asserting life’s value precisely where necropolitics denies it. “I can’t breathe” becomes affirmation of life against necropolitical suffocation.

Global North/South Binary

Mbembe is criticized for overstating Global North/South differences. Northern populations also face necropolitics: mass incarceration, police violence, disability abandonment, and immigrant detention. Yet there’s qualitative difference between U.S. prison and Gaza siege, between European welfare cuts and Congolese conflict minerals.

Perhaps necropolitics operates everywhere but with radically different intensities and forms. Or perhaps it’s central to colonized/racialized populations while biopower remains dominant for white Northern populations. This requires careful attention to historical and geographic specificity.

Romanticizing Death

Some critics worry necropolitics risks romanticizing death or positioning death as ultimate political expression. Mbembe’s discussion of suicide bombers troubles some readers. Does necropolitics inadvertently valorize violence?

Mbembe insists his analysis is descriptive, not prescriptive. He doesn’t advocate death but analyzes how contemporary sovereignty operates through death. Yet the concern remains: how do we analyze death’s politics without making death appear politically necessary or liberatory?

Political Implications

Abolitionist Politics

Necropolitics supports abolitionist politics—dismantling institutions that systematically produce death. Police, prisons, ICE, and military can’t be reformed because their function is necropolitical. Reform might reduce deaths temporarily but leaves necropolitical logic intact.

Abolition isn’t absence but transformation: redirecting resources from death-production to life-enabling infrastructure. Rather than police, community safety systems; rather than prisons, restorative justice; rather than borders, mobility justice; rather than military, peaceful foreign policy.

Life-Affirming Politics

Against necropolitics, radical politics must be life-affirming—asserting value of lives necropolitics deems disposable. Black Lives Matter, disability justice, immigrant rights, and Palestinian solidarity all assert: these lives matter, must be protected, deserve flourishing.

This isn’t naive humanism but political struggle against necropolitical sovereignty. When the state reserves right to kill, asserting life’s inviolability is revolutionary act. When capitalism organizes premature death, demanding healthcare, housing, clean environment, and livable planet is radical.

International Solidarity

Necropolitics’s global scope requires international solidarity. Northern activists must recognize their comfort depends on Southern necropolitics; Northern states’ life-administration requires Southern death-exposure. Genuine internationalism means dismantling these necropolitical geographies.

This means: reparations for colonialism, debt cancellation, technology transfer, open borders, climate reparations, and transformed international system not premised on Northern sovereignty over Southern life/death.

Right to Life vs. Right to Death

Necropolitics complicates typical “right to life” politics. It’s not just protecting life from death but transforming conditions that produce life as death-in-life. Palestinians don’t just need not to be killed; they need sovereignty, self-determination, and livable futures. Black Americans don’t just need police not to kill; they need abolishing carceral systems organizing slow death.

Similarly, “right to death” (euthanasia, suicide) takes different meaning under necropolitics. Whose deaths are honored? Whose are mourned? Who can die with dignity vs. whose deaths are precarious? The politics of death itself is necropolitical.

Further Reading

Foundational Texts

• Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11-40.
• Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Duke University Press, 2019. [Expanded book version]
• Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Duke University Press, 2017.
• Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. University of California Press, 2001.

Theoretical Context

• Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. 1976. Vintage, 1990.
• Foucault, Michel. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76. Picador, 2003.
• Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press, 1998.
• Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death. Harvard University Press, 1982.

Contemporary Analysis

• Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography.” Professional Geographer 54.1 (2002): 15-24.
• Berlant, Lauren. “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency).” Critical Inquiry 33.4 (2007): 754-780.
• Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Duke University Press, 2014.
• Puar, Jasbir K. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Duke University Press, 2017.

Palestine and Occupation

• Weizman, Eyal. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. Verso, 2007.
• Tawil-Souri, Helga, and Dina Matar, eds. Gaza as Metaphor. Hurst, 2016.
• Khalili, Laleh. Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies. Stanford University Press, 2013.

Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory

• Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. 1961. Grove Press, 2004.
• Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. 1950. Monthly Review Press, 2000.
• Mamdani, Mahmood. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton University Press, 1996.

Violence and Warfare

• Gregory, Derek. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Blackwell, 2004.
• Chamayou, Grégoire. A Theory of the Drone. The New Press, 2015.
• Shaw, Martin. War and Genocide: Organized Killing in Modern Society. Polity, 2003.

Resistance and Life-Making

• Moten, Fred, and Stefano Harney. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Minor Compositions, 2013.
• Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. W.W. Norton, 2019.
• Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.

See Also

• Biopolitics
• Sovereignty
• State of Exception
• Social Death
• Thanatopolitics
• Bare Life
• Colonialism
• Police Violence
• Border Control
• Genocide
• Slow Violence
• Organized Abandonment