Necropolitics

{{Short description|Use of power to dictate life and death}} '''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."<ref name=":4" /> Mbembe, author of ''On the Postcolony'', was the first scholar to explore the term in depth in his 2003 article,<ref name="mbembe">{{cite journal|last1=Mbembe|first1=Achille|author-link1=Achille Mbembe|title=Necropolitics|journal=Public Culture|date=2003|volume=15|issue=1|pages=11–40|url=https://www.dartmouth.edu/~lhc/docs/achillembembe.pdf|doi=10.1215/08992363-15-1-11|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151010043651/https://www.dartmouth.edu/~lhc/docs/achillembembe.pdf|archive-date=2015-10-10}}</ref> and later, his 2019 book of the same name.<ref name=":4">{{cite book |last1=Mbembe |first1=Achille |title=Necropolitics | trans-title= Politiques de l'inimitié | orig-year = 2016 | translator-last1= Corcoran | translator-first1= Steve | date=October 2019 |publisher=Duke University Press |location=Durham |isbn=978-1-4780-0651-0}}</ref> Mbembe identifies racism as a prime driver of necropolitics, stating that racialized people's lives are systemically cheapened and habituated to loss.<ref name=":4" />

== Concept == Necropolitics is often discussed as an extension of ''biopower'', the Foucauldian term for the use of social and political power to control people's lives. Foucault first discusses the concepts of biopower and biopolitics in his 1976 work, ''The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality Volume I.''<ref name=":0">{{Cite book|last=Foucault|first=Michel|title=The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality Volume I|publisher=Penguin|year=1978|isbn=0-14-012474-8|location=London}}</ref> Foucault presents biopower as a mechanism for "protecting", but acknowledges that this protection often manifests itself as subjugation of non-normative populations.<ref name=":0" /> The creation and maintenance of institutions that prioritize certain populations as more valuable is, according to Foucault, how population control has been normalized.<ref name=":0" />

Mbembe's concept of necropolitics acknowledges that contemporary state-sponsored death cannot be explained by the theories of biopower and biopolitics, stating that "under the conditions of necropower, the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom are blurred."<ref name="mbembe" /> Jasbir Puar assumes that discussions of biopolitics and necropolitics must be intertwined, because "the latter makes its presence known at the limits and through the excess of the former; [while] the former masks the multiplicity of its relationships to death and killing in order to enable the proliferation of the latter."<ref name=":2" />

Mbembe was clear that necropolitics is more than simply a right to kill (Foucault's ''droit de glaive''). While his view of necropolitics does include various forms of political violence such as the right to impose social or civil death, and the right to enslave others, it is also about the right to expose other people (including a country's own citizens) to mortal danger and death.<ref name="mbembe" /> Cultural theorist Lauren Berlant calls this gradual and persistent process of elimination slow death.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Bratich |first1=Jack Z. |title=On microfascism : gender, war, and death |date=2022 |location=Brooklyn, NY |isbn=978-1-94217-349-6 |page=10}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Berlant |first1=Lauren |title=Slow Death |journal=Critical Inquiry |date=Summer 2007 |volume=33 |issue=4 |page=754 |doi=10.1086/521568 |s2cid=161102783 |quote=The phrase slow death refers to the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence.}}</ref> According to Berlant, only specific populations are "marked out for wearing out"<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Berlant |first1=Lauren |title=Slow Death |journal=Critical Inquiry |date=Summer 2007 |volume=33 |issue=4 |page=761}}</ref> and the conditions of being worn out and dying are intimately linked with "the ordinary reproduction of [daily] life."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Berlant |first1=Lauren |title=Slow Death |journal=Critical Inquiry |date=Summer 2007 |volume=33 |issue=4 |page=762}}</ref>

Necropolitics is a theory of the walking dead, in which specific bodies are forced to remain in suspended states of being located somewhere between life and death. Mbembe provided a way of analyzing these "contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death."<ref name="mbembe" /> He utilized examples of slavery, apartheid, the colonization of Palestine and the figure of the suicide bomber to illustrate differing forms of necropower over the body (statist, racialized, a state of exception, urgency, martyrdom) and how this reduces people to precarious life conditions.<ref name="mbembe" />

According to Marina Gržinić, necropolitics precisely defines the forms taken by neo-liberal global capitalist cuts in financial support for public health, social and education structures. To her, these extreme cuts present intensive neo-liberal procedures of ‘rationalization’ and ‘civilization’.<ref>{{cite web | url=https://www.populismstudies.org/Vocabulary/necropolitics/ | title=Necropolitics - ECPS }}</ref>

== Living death == Mbembe's understanding of sovereignty, according to which the living are characterized as "free and equal men and women," informs how he expands the definition of necropolitics to include not only individuals experiencing death, but also experiencing social or political death.<ref name="mbembe" /> An individual unable to set their own limitations due to social or political interference is then considered, by Mbembe, to not be truly alive, as they are no longer sovereign over their own body.<ref name="mbembe" /> The ability for a state to subjugate populations so much so that they do not have the liberty of autonomy over their lives is an example of necropolitics. This creates zones of existence for the ''living dead'', those who no longer have sovereignty over their own body.<ref name=":4" /> R. Guy Emerson writes that necropolitics exists beyond the limits of administrative or state power being imposed on bodies, but also becomes internalized, coming to control behaviors over fear of death or fear of exposure to death worlds.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Guy Emerson|first=R.|title=Necropolitics: Living Death in Mexico|publisher=Springer|year=2019|isbn=9783030123024|pages=2–3}}</ref>

Frédéric Le Marcis discusses how the contemporary African prison system acts as an example of necropolitics.<ref name=":1">{{Cite journal|last=Le Marcis|first=Frédéric|date=2019|title=Life in a Space of Necropolitics: Toward an Economy of Value in Prisons|url=https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329736990|journal=Ethnos|language=en|volume=84|issue=1|pages=74–95|doi=10.1080/00141844.2018.1428207|s2cid=217508904}}</ref> Referring to the concept of living death as "stuckness", Le Marcis details life in prison as a state-sponsored creation of death; some examples he provides include malnourishment through a refusal to feed inmates, a lack of adequate healthcare, and the excusing of certain violent actions between inmates.<ref name=":1" /> Racism, discussed by Foucault as an integral component of wielding biopower, is also present in Le Marcis' discussion of the necropolitical prison system, specifically regarding the ways in which murder and suicide are often overlooked among inmates.<ref name=":1" /> Mbembe also contends that matters of homicide and suicide within state-governed institutions housing "less valuable" members of the necroeconomy are simply another example of social or political death.<ref name="mbembe" />

Ilana Feldman brings as an example the experience of Palestinian refugees in the situation of prolonged displacement. In her ethnographic work, a number of interviewees share how the combination of bad leadership, poor services in refugee camps and lack of international support resulted in a collective climate of hopelessness.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Feldman |first1=Ilana |title=Life Lived in Relief |date=October 2018 |publisher=The University of California Press |isbn=9780520299634}}</ref>

==Queer and trans necropolitics== {{seealso|Pinkwashing (LGBTQ)}} Jasbir Puar coined the term ''queer necropolitics'' to analyze the post-9/11 queer outrage regarding gay bashing and simultaneous queer complicity with Islamophobia.<ref name=":2">{{cite book|last1=Puar|first1=Jasbir K.|title=Terrorist assemblages: homonationalism in queer times|date=2007|publisher=Duke University Press|location=Durham|isbn=9780822340942|pages=32–79}}</ref> Through Mbembe's discussions, Puar addresses the dismissal of racism within the LGBTQ+ community as a form of assimilation and of distancing away from non-normative populations who are generally affected by necropolitics.<ref name=":2" /> Puar's research specifically focuses on the notion that "the homosexual other is white, the racial other is straight," which discounts queer people of color and their worth as a population, and reinforces tolerance of harm towards them.<ref name=":2" /> As a prime example of this, Puar brings up the Israeli colonization of Palestine, in which Israel uses its non-Palestinian LGBTQ+ population to project an image of itself as a "tolerant, diverse, and democractic society," in order to deflect people from examining its "dismal human rights record" (Pinkwashing (LGBTQ)).<ref name=":2" />

Many scholars use Puar's queer necropolitics in conjunction with Judith Butler's concept of a grievable life.<ref name=":3">{{cite book|last1=Butler|first1=Judith|title=Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence|date=2004|publisher=Verso|location=London|isbn=978-1844670055|pages=20–35}}</ref> Butler's discussion of the HIV/AIDS epidemic specifically addresses the shortcomings of Foucault's concept of biopower for non-normative populations that experience multiple intersections of Other-ness.<ref name=":3" /> Butler connects the lives of queer individuals to those of "war casualties that the United States inflicts," noting that these deaths cannot be publicly grieved unless the perpetrators regard their victims as noteworthy.<ref name=":3" /> Butler claims that obituaries normalize the necropolitics of the lives of queer people and the lives of people of color.<ref name=":3" />

In "Trans Necropolitics: A Transnational Reflection on Violence, Death, and the Trans of Color Afterlife" Snorton and Haritaworn investigate the necropolitical nature of trans people of color's lives and examine the 'making dead' of trans people of color, and especially trans women of color, as an intentionally violent political strategy.<ref>{{cite book|author1=C. Riley Snorton|author2=Jin Haritaworn|chapter=Trans Necropolitics: A Transnational Reflection on Violence, Death, and the Trans of Color Afterlife|title=Transgender Studies Reader|editor1=Susan Stryker|editor2=Aren Aizura|edition=2nd|location=New York|year=2013|publisher=Routledge}}</ref>

===Against trans and gender-diverse people=== In the academic article ''Necropolitics and Trans Identities: Language Use as Structural Violence'', authors Kinsey Stewart and Thomas Delgado argue that language can also harm the dead and that the use of language within medicolegal death investigation reflects and reinforces structural violence against transgender and gender diverse people.<ref>{{cite journal |title=Necropolitics and Trans Identities: Language Use as Structural Violence |journal=Humans |date=2023 |doi=10.3390/humans3020010 |doi-access=free |last1=Stewart |first1=Kinsey B. |last2=Delgado |first2=Thomas A. |volume=3 |issue=2 |pages=106–125 }}</ref>

== Further developments == Khaled Al-Kassimi, the author of ''International Law, Necropolitics, and Arab Lives'',<ref>{{Cite web |title=Khaled Al-Kassimi - Routledge & CRC Press Author Profile |url=https://www.routledge.com/authors/i23183-khaled-al-kassimi |access-date=2024-03-07 |website=www.routledge.com}}</ref> recently expanded the theoretical framework of necropolitics by engaging in an epistemic inquiry to deconstruct the philosophical and theological reasons as to why Western modernity necessitates deploying "necropower" for onto-epistemic coherence.<ref name=":5">{{Cite book |last=Al-Kassimi |first=Khaled |url=https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781003306375/international-law-necropolitics-arab-lives-khaled-al-kassimi |title=International Law, Necropolitics, and Arab Lives: The Legalization of Creative Chaos in Arabia |date=2022-10-27 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-1-003-30637-5 |location=London |doi=10.4324/9781003306375}}</ref> In doing so, Al-Kassimi mentions that while racism is a material explanation to the exercise of necropolitics, it is the epistemic schism between both "spiritual Arabia" and "secular Europe" that demands the latter to "ban" the former from the juridical order and render them the "living-dead".<ref name=":5" />

By navigating Latin-European scholastics in the 15th century, including the positivist juridical turn during and after the Enlightenment period, Al-Kassimi concludes that "Arab epistemology emphasiz[ing] the spiritual rather than simply the material"<ref name=":5" /> requires "secular" Western modernity to demand the elevation of Arab subjects to the exception and rendering them through technologies of racism and essentialist narratives as "bare-life", "Muselmann", or the "living-dead"; that is, objects of sovereign necropower.<ref name=":5" />

==References== {{wikiquote}} {{Reflist}}

== Further reading ==

* Geller, P.L. (2021). "What Is Necropolitics?". In: Theorizing Bioarchaeology. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70704-0_5 * Rouse, C.M. (2021). "Necropolitics versus Biopolitics: Spatialization, White Privilege, and Visibility during a Pandemic". In: Journal of Cultural Anthropology. Vol. 36, No. 3. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca36.3.03

Category:2003 neologisms Category:Sociological terminology Category:Biopolitics Category:Queer theory Category:Philosophy of death *