Necropolitics

In the opening line of Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe explains that he writes from the perspective of someone living in Africa, emphasizing his separation from Western philosophical thought. As he challenges liberal democracy and the organization of power in modern politics, he also responds to the Western ideas presented by writers like John Locke, Franz Fanon, Thomas Hobbes, Hannah Arendt, and Giorgio Agamben. Mbembe weaves the ideas of these philosophers and others into his own work while exposing how colonialism and imperialism have shaped modern philosophy. The title and focus of Mbembe’s work function as responses to one of the social critic’s greatest influences: 20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucault.

Foucault’s groundbreaking text The History of Sexuality explores how Western society has approached sex and sexuality, as well as the intrinsic relationship between power and the body. By tracing this relationship through time, Foucault reveals that sovereign states spent centuries exercising total control over the lives and deaths of their subjects. However, modernity has limited this capacity. In Foucault’s work Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, he examines how modernity shifted public executions and penances to intensely private and separated forms of punitive bureaucracy.

Because states can no longer wield death with impunity, Foucault suggests that they instead turn their attention to governing the practice of life. Rather than using subtraction through death to dominate, states elevate addition through the generation of life. Governments structure this power by focusing on the body as a tool for productivity and economic growth in addition to its reproductive usefulness. By centering health, population, and mortality as priorities, states present a narrative of well-being while still applying the same level of bodily control.

Mbembe draws from Foucault’s work but challenges a central pillar of biopolitics, positing that sovereigns enact power over death rather than life. The Cameroonian philosopher and political theorist uses his concept of the politics of space to show how states govern through the distribution, organization, and movement of large groups of people. This allows the state to keep some groups inside the safety of the social contract while using the bodies and deaths of other groups in a space that Mbembe calls the “colony.” Prisons, residential schools, and refugee camps represent culturally external spaces that operate under a different set of policies and laws than the rest of the sovereign state.

Mbembe shows how Foucault’s focus on biopolitics fails to consider the nature of a liberal democracy, which is to generate divisions in which certain categories of people can be separated and killed while others enjoy the benefits of a social contract that favors them. Foucault’s “biopolitics” emphasizes life, but Mbembe’s “necropolitics” points to the violence that underscores modern sovereignty. Mbembe argues that violence is the foundation of liberal democracies that determine who benefits from the social contract and who does not. Therefore, states’ emphasis of subtraction, which has marked centuries of human civilizations, continues. Modernity has masked this truth by framing it within a narrative of colonialism.