This book’s title first appeared in Mbembe’s 2003 article by the same name. “Necropolitics” builds upon Foucalt’s concept of biopower, and is a way of theorizing how social and political power are used to dictate how people live and die. Mbembe’s work isn’t simply concerned with the state’s right to kill (or decide who may live), but also examines how sovereignty is used to impose and maintain forms of social and political death. The treatment of refugees and migrant workers from Africa and the middle east at European borders is used as a powerful demonstration of Mbembe’s “necropolitics”. Through various justifications, such as a person’s lack of state identification or by casting doubt on the legitimacy of a person’s claim to being a refugee, states are able to cordon away vast numbers of people seeking sanctuary at their borders. It’s common to see this cordoning take shape as a refugee camp, with its occupants being restricted from meaningful forms of participation in society. Holding people in bureaucratic limbo, refusing to recognize their personhood and limiting what assistance is rendered, confers a status of living death upon the people caught within these circumstances.
We’re going to spend years dealing with the fallout from the world’s worst pandemic in recent memory, and the US’s treatment of immigrants (both within and at the country’s borders) is in urgent need of change. Mbembe’s book provides tools for understanding how cruelty is systematized and maintained by states, and how social and political power is used to render certain people expendible. Perhaps more importantly, its perspective helps link what might seem like separable crises and injustices to common practices of management that modern states employ.