Necropolitics, as theorized by Achille Mbembe, names the form of sovereignty that operates through the management of death rather than the management of life. Where Michel Foucault’s biopolitics analyzes how modern states govern by “making live and letting die,” necropolitics addresses the conditions — colonial occupation, plantation slavery, contemporary zones of abandonment — where sovereignty operates by making die and letting live. The question shifts from how states manage the life of populations to how states determine which populations are exposed to death.
Mbembe argues that Foucault’s framework, developed primarily from European history, cannot account for the forms of power exercised in colonial and postcolonial contexts. In the colony, the plantation, and the occupation zone, sovereignty does not govern through the optimization of life but through the subjugation of life to the power of death. This is not an aberration of modern politics but its constitutive outside — the condition that makes metropolitan biopolitics possible. The management of life within the metropole depends on the production of death zones elsewhere.
Necropolitics names conditions that persist in the present: the differential exposure to environmental toxicity, the withdrawal of infrastructure from specific communities, the management of migration through deliberate exposure to danger, and the calculus by which some deaths count as tragedy while others register as statistics or do not register at all. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of racism as “group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” is a necropolitical formulation: it locates racism not in individual attitudes but in the political production of differential mortality.
Related terms
- Achille Mbembe — who develops the concept
- Biopolitics — the Foucauldian framework necropolitics extends
- Michel Foucault — whose biopolitics Mbembe critiques and extends
- Ruth Wilson Gilmore — organized abandonment as necropolitical practice
- Elizabeth Povinelli — quasi-event as a parallel concept
- Settler colonialism — the structure that produces death zones
- Environmental racism — necropolitics operating through environmental exposure