Necropolitics

What happens when political power is defined not primarily by the capacity to protect or administer life, but by the authority to decide who may be exposed to death? Achille Mbembe makes this question the starting point for a radical critique of contemporary sovereignty. The concept of necropolitics, developed in a landmark essay published in 2003, makes it possible to examine forms of domination that produce territories of abandonment, occupation, terror, and destruction, where certain human groups live under the constant threat of being deemed expendable.

In Necropolitics, published in English by Duke University Press in 2019 on the basis of the French book Politiques de l’inimitié (2016), Mbembe broadens the scope of his critique to encompass transformations of democracy, enmity, and global relations of violence. His diagnosis maintains that colonialism, slavery, and racial hierarchies are not merely anomalies external to political modernity: they belong to its constitutive history and reappear in other forms within security apparatuses, the militarization of borders, and policies of exclusion.

The dialogue with Michel Foucault is central, but it is not simply a refutation of biopolitics. Mbembe shifts the focus toward configurations of power in which death, systematic exposure to danger, and the designation of enemy populations become techniques of government. War ceases to be exclusively a confrontation between sovereign entities and also emerges as a horizon that organizes spaces, bodies, and rights. The analysis of societies of enmity forces us to ask how fear, racialization, and the state of exception can become ordinary components of political experience.

The work also draws on Frantz Fanon to consider a way out of a world built upon separation and hostility. The questions of care, shared vulnerability, and relations with the other open an ethical dimension that prevents the book from being reduced to an exclusively bleak theory of power. Against the mechanisms that turn human lives into disposable objects, Mbembe explores the possibility of imagining a humanity that is not organized around the need to produce enemies.

Its bibliographical stages must be carefully distinguished: the 2003 article, the 2016 French book, and the 2019 English edition are not interchangeable publications. The English volume includes a more extensive organization of chapters than the original French edition. Read with this distinction in mind, Necropolitics is a far-reaching intervention in political philosophy, postcolonial studies, and human rights: it shifts the question from who has the power to govern to who possesses the power to make other people's lives uninhabitable.