Context: Necropolitics is a theory that examines how modern nation states determine whose lives are disposable and may be sacrificed in the name of security, threat, or political control.
Relevance of the Topic: Prelims: About the idea of Necropolitics. Mains: Essay: Necropolitics: What, How Necropolitics Operates?
What is Necropolitics?
- Necropolitics refers to the power of the state (or other authorities) to decide who may live and who must die. It goes beyond physical killing as it includes slow neglect, abandonment, and structural violence where certain people are denied care, dignity, or justice.
- E.g., Bengal Famine of 1943 - Millions died not due to a lack of food, but because British colonial policies prioritised imperial interests over Indian lives.
- The idea of Necropolitics was coined by Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe in a 2003 essay and later expanded in his book Necropolitics (2019). The concept of Necropolitics builds on Michel Foucault’s Notion of Biopolitics.
How Necropolitics Operates?
Necropolitics is not always about open violence. It works through invisible systems and everyday decisions. Mbembe identifies key features of necropolitical systems:
- State terror and suppression: Even in democracies, dissent is crushed using surveillance, arrests, or killings.
- Collaboration with non-state actors: Governments often work with militias or gangs, blurring lines between legal and illegal violence.
- Enemy creation as governance: Politics often revolves around inventing an enemy- a community to blame, exclude, or control.
- War and terror as economies: Violence fuels industries- arms, surveillance, and security become profitable.
- Displacement of communities: Large-scale resource projects or conflict zones often force poor people out of their homes.
- Varied forms of death: Torture, drone strikes, hunger, lack of healthcare, all can be tools of political death.
- Moral justifications: Ideologies like nationalism, religion, or security are used to justify abandonment or violence.
‘Living Dead’ and ‘Death Worlds’
- Mbembe introduces the idea of the "living dead", people who are alive biologically but have been stripped of all social, legal, and political recognition.
- These people may not be killed directly, but live in conditions so degrading and unstable, it is like dying slowly every day.
- For Example: During India’s COVID-19 lockdown, migrant workers were left without food, shelter, or transport. Many died walking back to their villages, not from the virus, but from state neglect.
- Mbembe calls such spaces “death worlds”, zones where people live outside the protection of law, care, or justice.
The State of Exception:
- Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben describes the "state of exception", a situation where governments suspend laws and rights in the name of protecting them.
- Mbembe extends this idea: For some communities (like refugees, slum dwellers, minorities), this exception is not temporary, it is permanent. In these zones, people are governed by logistics, not justice.
Necropolitics in Everyday Life:
- Necropolitics is not confined to war zones. It thrives in the slow violence of poverty, caste, racism, and displacement. It exists all around us, through silence, neglect, and “routine” policy decisions.
- Examples:
- Sterilisation of Dalit and Adivasi women: bodies controlled without consent.
- Police profiling of Muslims or Dalits: targeted surveillance.
- Neglect of refugees, slum dwellers, and tribal areas: systemic denial of basic rights.
- It also exists in silence, in the world including states and global institutions, looking away as thousands of civilians, including women and children, are killed in places like Gaza, while the rest of us carry on with our daily lives.
- In a necropolitical world, the aim must not just be survival. It must be the right to a dignified life- a life that is: Valued, Protected, Mourned if lost.
Way Forward
Challenge Necropolitics by:
- Resisting narratives that normalise suffering.
- Questioning systems that abandon the most vulnerable.
- Demanding policies that protect all lives equally.
Recognising necropolitics around us is the first step towards building a state that protects, not abandons, a nation where every life counts.