Necropolitics and homo sacer

The postcolonial critic Achille Mbembe offers “necropolitics” as a corrective complement to Michel Foucault's broadly known idea of “biopolitics.” Foucault underlines that modern liberal governments have moved away from controlling the population through the imminent threat of death to use subtler disciplinary techniques to achieve the (un)conscious subjugation of the subject and its body. The validity of the influence of bio-power rests with the constant reproduction of living subjects. However, Mbembe points out that biopolitics is not sufficient for explaining how the work of death continues to prevail as a technique of governance in the contemporary politics and everyday life. His arguments lie in that the sovereign, whose role is to defend society from potential threats, is still given the power to determine who may live and who must die. Thus, the relationship between politics and death is essential to understanding “how the state has emerged through its reproduction of death and to examine consequent transformations in the meaning and representation of death in everyday life for its citizens” (Mbembe, 2003, p.16).

To demonstrate the presence of necro-power, Mbembe, unlike Foucault's reliance on Western European cases, draws examples from the more politically volatile state of peripheral regions and countries. For instance, in many African states, the political economy of statehood has changed drastically over the past few decades. Governments have failed to maintain the economic underpinning for political authority and order, and in turn have been forced to forfeit their monopoly on violence and control over death. Therefore, “other armed forces such as urban military, armies of regional lords and private armies all claim the right to exercise violence to kill” (Mbembe, 2003, p.26). These armed powers share a complicated relationship with the state, at times usurping control and undermining state power and at others allying with it to eliminate competing armed groups. Rather than writing this situation off as a simple “failure of the state,” Mbembe claims that this is a form of war in which survival of the fittest governs any and all human action, leading to an incessant chain of violence and terror.