Necropolitics

In this essay Cameroonian researcher Achille Mbembe draws on Michel Foucault's concept of sovereign power, Giorgio Agamben's discourse on homo sacer, and Frantz Fanon's decolonial approach to situate the notion of biopower in the space of postcolony and demonstrates its insufficiency for understanding contemporary forms of subjugating life to the power of death. Mbembe introduces the notion of necropolitics, or necropower, to explain the various ways in which weapons are used in the modern world to create ‘worlds of death’. He argues that the colony in general and slave plantations in particular gave rise to those necropolitical practices that remain relevant today. Mbembe describes the postcolonial locus as a place where diffuse and not always exclusively state power inscribes an ‘economy of death’ into relations of governance and production, and argues that whereas in the colonial era violence was solely a means of achieving profit, in the space of postcolony it becomes an end in itself.