Necropolitics

Michel Foucault used the term biopower to describe how states apply power to manage life. Foucault focused on how institutions and states use population control, data, and reproduction to maintain domination and exert political control. Mbembe extends Foucault’s work on biopower through his theory of necropolitics.

Referring to the practice of domination and control by a country over specific territories, colonialism seeks to exploit resources and Indigenous peoples for profit. Colonizers settle into other spaces and then establish and impose their own culture and systems of government. Mbembe proposes that violence is inherent to colonialism and thus to modern liberal democracy because it grew out of colonialism.

One of two forms of racism that Mbembe identifies is cultural racism. This term refers to the major distinctions that govern how people view the ways of life, language, and traditions of specific groups of people.

Mbembe uses the term “deathworlds” as another way to reference states of exclusion. This word emphasizes the nature of such spaces as a limbo between life and death that strip the people who live inside them of the rights that give life meaning and hope.

In a democracy, the power is vested in the people whom the government serves. Liberal democracy involves a representative form of democracy that emphasizes individual rights. The philosophical work of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke helped shape liberal democracy.

Mbembe argues that nanoracism is now the most common form of racism. Nanoracism represents the hidden and pervasive racism embedded in everyday life that normalize persistent colonial violence.

Mbembe developed the concept of necropolitics, which extends Foucault’s concept of biopower. In Mbembe’s theory, governments exert power by holding people in states of pervasive death, called states of injury.

Mbembe proposes that democracies need the concept of the Other, which supports the mythology and violence of colonialism, to create a need for the social contract. The social contract benefits the hero sector of the population while oppressing the Other.

Mbembe uses the ancient Greek term pharmakon to describe the dual nature of democracy. The term means remedy and carries a connotation of both poison and medicine. In Mbembe’s work, pharmakon helps illustrate how democracies benefit some while harming others.

The term planetary entanglement refers to the unique problem of the modern age. Mbembe explains that society continues to become increasingly complex, further exacerbating the problems of democracy.

Thomas Hobbes and John Locke explored the idea of the social contract. It asserts that governments enter an agreement with their citizens through which they exchange some rights for a guarantee of security.

Mbembe uses the term “state of exception” in the tradition that Giorgio Agamben established. Mbembe’s work uses the term interchangeably with “zones of exclusion” and “states of injury,” although each description lends new context to the concept. “Exception” and “exclusion” imply how such political spaces function outside the law. In them, sovereign states enact power and domination over marginalized groups with impunity. “Injury” connects these terms to Mbembe’s concept of “deathworlds.”

Throughout most of the work, Mbembe uses the term technology to refer to an instrument or tool for the maintenance and perpetuation of power. He also uses the term to refer to innovations of human advancement and how they shape the future of democracy.