Achille Mbembe (born 1957) is a Cameroonian philosopher and political theorist based at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. His work examines colonialism, postcolonial governance, and the political management of death as a technology of power.
Core ideas
- Necropolitics: Mbembe’s most influential concept extends Michel Foucault’s biopolitics. Where Foucault analyzed how modern states govern through the management of life (making live and letting die), Mbembe argues that sovereignty in colonial and postcolonial contexts operates through the management of death — deciding who may live and who must die. Necropolitics names the subjugation of life to the power of death on a scale that exceeds Foucault’s framework, encompassing slavery, colonial occupation, and contemporary zones of abandonment.
- The postcolony: in On the Postcolony (2001), Mbembe analyzes the political culture of postcolonial African states not as failed versions of Western democracy but as specific formations with their own logics of power, performance, and subjection. The postcolony is characterized by the obscenity of power — its excess, its theatricality, its simultaneous violence and absurdity.
- Critique of reason: Mbembe traces how Enlightenment reason produced the category of the “Negro” — a figure defined as the antithesis of the rational subject, against which European humanity constituted itself. This is not a historical accident but a structural feature of modern reason: it requires an outside, and colonized peoples were made to occupy that position.
- Becoming Black of the world: in Critique of Black Reason (2013/2017), Mbembe argues that the conditions once reserved for Black people under colonialism and slavery — precarity, disposability, subjection to market logic — are becoming generalized under neoliberalism. The “becoming Black of the world” names this universalization of precarity.
Notable works
- On the Postcolony (2001) (cite: Mbembe, 2001)
- Critique of Black Reason (2013, English translation 2017) (cite: Mbembe, 2017)
- Necropolitics (2019) (cite: Mbembe, 2019)
- Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization (2021)
Related
- Necropolitics — the concept he develops
- Biopolitics — the Foucauldian framework necropolitics extends
- Michel Foucault — whose biopolitics Mbembe critiques and extends
- Frantz Fanon — foundational decolonial thinker Mbembe extends
- Elizabeth Povinelli — fellow theorist of late liberal governance and abandonment
- Sylvia Wynter — parallel critique of how “Man” constituted itself through exclusion
- Ruth Wilson Gilmore — organized abandonment as necropolitical practice
- Settler colonialism — the colonial structures Mbembe’s work addresses
Mbembe, A. (2001). On the Postcolony. University of California Press.
Mbembe, A. (2017). Critique of Black Reason. Duke University Press.
Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics. Duke University Press.