About the author
Cameroonian philosopher and political theorist (b. 1957), based at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. One of the most influential contemporary theorists of postcolonialism, race, and sovereignty, Mbembe is known for On the Postcolony and for the concept of 'necropolitics,' which reshaped debates about power, colonialism, and the state.
Synopsis
Mbembe argues that the ultimate expression of sovereignty is the power over death — to decide who is disposable. Tracing this 'necropolitics' through slavery, colonial occupation, apartheid, and contemporary zones of violence, he shows how race and colonialism made certain lives killable and created spaces of 'living death.' He extends Foucault and Agamben to argue that the colony, not the European nation, reveals the true face of modern sovereign power.
Core passage idea
Paraphrase · Modern copyrighted workMbembe argues that sovereignty's ultimate expression is 'necropower' — the capacity to decide who may live and who must die — most nakedly revealed in slavery, the colony, and the racialized zones where whole populations are consigned to living death.
By shifting the analysis of power from the management of life to the administration of death, Mbembe centers race and colonialism in the theory of the modern state. Necropolitics names how sovereignty has always reserved the power to render certain lives disposable.
To avoid a bubble
Pair with Foucault's account of biopower, which Mbembe extends and revises, and with liberal theorists of sovereignty and human rights who resist his bleak reading of the state primarily through the lens of death and exception.
Reading note
Dense and theoretical; the title essay is the essential core. Read it as the postcolonial extension of Foucault's biopower, alongside Fanon and Agamben, for a theory of race, violence, and sovereignty.
Best paired with
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality; Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.