Necropolitics

Introduction

An article by the Cameroonian historian and political theorist Achille Mbembe, published in English in 2003 in the journal Public Culture; an expanded book version appeared in French in 2016 (Politiques de l’inimitié) and in English as Necropolitics in 2019. Mbembe argues that Foucault’s concept of biopower, power over life, does not suffice to describe forms of domination in which the sovereign decides who may live and who must die. He traces this “necropower” from the plantation through the colony and apartheid to the occupation of Palestine and to the suicide bomber, for whom death becomes a means of resistance. The text is widely read in postcolonial studies, political theory and Black studies.

Connections

Builds on

• The Wretched of the Earth1961 · Frantz Fanon
• The Will to Knowledge (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1)1976 · Michel Foucault
• Homo Sacer1995 · Giorgio Agamben

Taken up in

• Critique of Black Reason2013 · Achille Mbembe

More works by Achille Mbembe

• 2000On the Postcolony
• 2013Critique of Black Reason