Necropolitics: who is allowed to live and who may die, Pg 11.

Key Highlights:

• Necropolitics is the use of political power to decide who is allowed to live and who must die, often through systemic neglect, abandonment, or violence.
• The term was coined by Achille Mbembe in 2003 and builds upon Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics.
• While biopolitics is about managing and optimizing life, necropolitics governs death and determines whose lives are disposable.
• Examples range from the Bengal famine under British colonial rule to Gaza bombings, COVID-19 lockdown migrant crises, and caste-based sterilisation policies.
• Modern state actions—surveillance, detention, resource extraction, and legal exceptions—form part of necropolitical governance.
• The ‘living dead’ refers to people stripped of rights, dignity, and care, forced to survive in degrading conditions (e.g., refugees, slum dwellers, undocumented migrants).
• Necropolitics also includes global silence and complicity in human rights violations, often in the name of national security or economic growth.

Detailed Insights:

• Conceptual Difference:
  • Foucault’s biopower: Governs life through public health, census, reproduction, etc.
  • Mbembe’s necropower: Governs death by exposing marginalised groups to violence, neglect, or erasure.
• State of Exception: As per Giorgio Agamben, modern states use emergency laws to suspend rights. For many marginalised communities, this becomes a permanent condition, not a temporary exception.
• Living Dead: People exist biologically but lack political or social recognition—seen during India’s migrant crisis in COVID-19 or among stateless Rohingya refugees.
• Mechanisms of Necropolitics:
  • Normalised structural violence (poverty, hunger, forced migration)
  • Policy-based exclusions (surveillance, detention, denial of healthcare)
  • Moral justifications via nationalism, utilitarianism, or religion
  • Collusion of state and non-state actors in enforcing death-like conditions
• Global Silence as Complicity: International inaction in crises like Gaza or African famine zones reflects moral hierarchies that render some deaths grievable and others not.
• Slow Violence: Environmental neglect, poverty, and caste marginalisation are also necropolitical as they gradually extinguish life and dignity over time.

Concepts Involved:

• Biopolitics (Foucault): Control of populations by regulating life processes (e.g., through healthcare, census, birth control).
• Necropolitics (Mbembe): Exercise of sovereignty that legitimises exposure to death and suffering, either actively or passively.
• State of Exception (Agamben): A legal state where normal law is suspended in favour of emergency powers.
• Living Dead: A necropolitical category where people are not killed outright but are stripped of rights and subjected to dehumanising survival.