Necropolitics:
Necropolitics is a sociopolitical theory of the use of social and political power to dictate how some people may live and how some must die. The deployment of necropolitics creates what Achille Mbembe calls deathworlds, or “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead.” Mbembe, author of On the Postcolony, was the first scholar to explore the term in depth in his 2003 article, and later, his 2019 book of the same name. Mbembe identifies racism as a prime driver of necropolitics, stating that racialized people’s lives are systemically cheapened and habituated to loss. [Wikipedia]
Noted in “Why I’m choosing to fight Harris,” Karen Attiah, WaPo:
Yet I could not stop thinking of an idea expressed by the Cameroonian historian and theorist Achille Mbembe. “Necropolitics,” he observed, is the terrible reckoning that “the calculus of life passes through the death of the Other.” I had hoped the administration would enact arms restrictions to force right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop the needless death of the Palestinian “Other.” I had hoped it would not toss aside the concerns of Arab, Muslim, Palestinian and Lebanese communities.
A way of looking at society from a post-colonial perspective? Or just another way to express everyday life? I’m not sure.
