What Demarcates Necropolitics from Biopolitics? A Foucauldian Critique of Mbembe

Abstract

Achille Mbembe presents ‘necropolitics’ as a corrective to Foucault’s conception of biopolitics, which Mbembe argues is insufficient to account for the contemporary politics of death. However, it is not clear that Mbembe succeeds in (a) demonstrating the deficiencies of Foucault’s framework or (b) demarcating necropolitics from biopolitics. In this article, I argue that Mbembe misconstrues Foucault’s understanding of the relationship between biopower and sovereign power, and thus underestimates Foucault’s capacity to account for racialized violence. On this basis, I suggest that the essence of necropolitics is already captured by Foucault’s concepts of State racism and thanatopolitics, and that Mbembe is wrong to suggest that ‘necropower’ constitutes a modality of power in its own right. Nonetheless, I maintain that Mbembe’s work has value in bringing certain effects of power into focus, as evidenced by his insights into the creation of ‘death-worlds’ and the racialized category of ‘the living dead’.

Introduction

Achille Mbembe presents ‘necropolitics’ as a corrective to Foucault’s conception of biopolitics, which Mbembe argues is insufficient to account for the contemporary politics of death. While Mbembe’s work has certainly been influential, it is not clear that he succeeds in (a) demonstrating the deficiencies of Foucault’s framework or (b) demarcating necropolitics from biopolitics. In this article, I argue that Mbembe’s articulation of necropolitics lacks conceptual clarity and is predicated on a fundamental misreading of Foucault’s work. More specifically, I show that Mbembe misconstrues Foucault’s understanding of the relationship between biopower and sovereign power, and thus underestimates Foucault’s capacity to account for racialized violence. This leaves Mbembe’s framework in need of conceptual reconstruction, and raises important questions about how his work should be operationalized to analyse contemporary socio-political phenomena. Ultimately, I suggest that ‘necropower’ is best conceptualized as the convergence of biological racism and sovereign power. On this basis, I suggest that the essence of necropolitics is already captured by Foucault’s concepts of State racism and thanatopolitics, and that Mbembe is wrong to suggest that ‘necropower’ constitutes a modality of power in its own right. For these reasons, I argue that Mbembe ultimately fails to demarcate necropolitics from biopolitics. Nonetheless, I maintain that Mbembe’s work has value in bringing certain effects of power into focus, as evidenced by his insights into the creation of ‘death-worlds’ and the racialized category of ‘the living dead’.

This article is divided into three sections. The first section focuses on Mbembe’s critique of Foucault, and shows that it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Foucault’s notion of biopower and its relationship to State racism. In the second section, I critically examine Mbembe’s notion of necropower, and argue that it does not constitute a distinct modality of power. Furthermore, I argue that recent attempts to demarcate necropolitics from biopolitics in the secondary literature have been unsuccessful. In the third section, I outline how Mbembe’s concepts of death-worlds and the living dead should be reflexively operationalized within Foucault’s broader framework of biopolitics.

Biopower, Sovereign Power, and State Racism: Correcting Mbembe’s Misreading of Foucault

Mbembe’s work has been challenged for several reasons, with most critics focusing on his seminal essay collection On the Postcolony (Mbembe, 2001 [2000]). This includes charges that Mbembe is excessively pessimistic about the condition of post-colonial Africa and the prospects for effective resistance (Abrahamsen, 2003: 208–9; Karlström, 2003; Weate, 2003: 36–9). Additionally, some readers have suggested that his work is theoretically confused, structured by unconscious gender bias, or even underestimates the centrality of anti-black racism and slavery to the historical development of biopolitics (Butler, 1992: 70–3; Sexton, 2010: 32–9; Weate, 2003: 27–32, 38–9). However, critics have rarely questioned the distinctiveness of necropolitics as a conceptual framework, especially in relation to Foucault’s work. This is precisely the issue this article aims to address.

At the outset, it is important to clarify Foucault’s notion of biopower and how it functions within his broader framework of biopolitics. ¹ This is crucial in evaluating whether Mbembe’s critique and subsequent extension of Foucault’s framework are successful. I will argue that many of the supposed deficiencies that Mbembe identifies in Foucault’s work are actually the result of misunderstandings or outright misrepresentations. Mbembe’s misreading of Foucault is based on two distinct but related mistakes. First, Mbembe conflates Foucault’s understanding of biopower with Agamben’s appropriation of the concept. For this reason, Mbembe fails to recognize the key distinction that Foucault draws between sovereign power and biopower. Second, Mbembe mischaracterizes Foucault’s account of State racism. This mischaracterization stems both from his aforementioned conflation of Foucault and Agamben’s conceptions of biopower, and from a lack of attention to Foucault’s genealogy of State racism in Society Must Be Defended.

Mbembe concludes the title essay in Necropolitics by claiming to have shown ‘that the notion of biopower is insufficient to account for contemporary forms of the subjugation of life to the power of death’ (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 92). However, there is a serious lack of conceptual clarity surrounding Mbembe’s treatment of biopower itself. He begins the essay with a discussion of sovereignty:

The ultimate expression of sovereignty largely resides in the power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die. To kill or to let live thus constitutes sovereignty’s limits, its principal attributes. To be sovereign is to exert one’s control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power. (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 66)

This claim is unobjectionable in itself and consistent with Foucault’s own definition of sovereign power. However, Mbembe writes immediately after: ‘This sums up what Michel Foucault meant by biopower: that domain of life over which power has asserted its control’ (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 66). This is not an accurate representation of Foucault’s view. Foucault does not define biopower as the domain of life over which sovereignty asserts control. Rather, he describes it as a historically distinct modality of power that conceives of life in sociobiological terms and employs techniques of power that attempt to regulate biological life at the level of the population (Foucault, 1978 [1976]: 134–45). ² In this way, Foucauldian biopolitics examines techniques of power that are historically specific and, most importantly, distinct from the techniques of sovereign power. Indeed, in The Will to Knowledge, Foucault describes biopower as acting upon life through ‘continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms’ and explicitly claims that it is not ‘a matter of bringing death into play in the field of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain of value and utility’ (Foucault, 1978 [1976]: 144). In this way, biopower is not simply one more manifestation of sovereign power, but a modality of power in its own right. As we will see shortly, Foucault thinks biopower and sovereign power interact in complex and significant ways, but maintains that they should be conceptualized as distinct modalities of power (Foucault, 1978 [1976]: 144; 2003 [1997]: 254–6).

Mbembe’s confusion stems from his tendency to conflate Foucault’s understanding of biopower with Agamben’s appropriation of the concept. Whereas Foucault sees biopower as fundamentally distinct from sovereign power, Agamben conceives of biopower as inscribed within the logic of sovereignty itself. Agamben famously positions his Homo Sacer project as an effort to correct or, at least, complete Foucault’s account of biopolitics (Agamben, 1998 [1995]: 9). For Agamben, sovereignty always already exercises power over life. Agamben draws on the Ancient Greek distinction between two different types of life. The first is bios, which refers to ‘the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group’ (Agamben, 1998 [1995]: 1). The second is zoē, which denotes ‘the simple fact of living common to all living beings’ (Agamben, 1998 [1995]: 1). According to Agamben, sovereignty exercises power over life insofar as it is always capable of reducing forms of life endowed with political rights (bios) to the status of what he calls ‘bare life’ – a condition in which one has been stripped of their rights and the dignity associated with them (Agamben, 1998 [1995]: 8–10). However, bare life is not a total reduction to animal life (zoē) insofar as the exclusion of the individual from the political community paradoxically includes them within the system of sovereign power through the very process of exclusion. This leads Agamben to argue that ‘the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power’ (Agamben, 1998 [1995]: 6). For Agamben, this is because the power to exclude – or to decide on the ‘state of exception’ in which rights and the rule of law are suspended – is inherently a form of power over life (Agamben, 1998 [1995]: 6–9).

Therefore, we can see that the term ‘biopower’ denotes at least two distinct forms of power. For Agamben, it refers to the way that power over life is inscribed in the framework of sovereignty itself, and, for him, biopower serves as a fundamental category of Western ontology (see Koopman, 2015: 574). On the other hand, Foucault conceives of biopower as a historically limited modality of power that targets life in specifically sociobiological terms. Much has been written about the relative merits of each concept and the extent to which Foucault’s work actually needs the supposed correction offered by Agamben, at least at a conceptual level. ³ However, the crucial question for my purposes is which of these conceptions of biopower Mbembe is ultimately working with. After all, one might think that Mbembe is principally citing Foucault in his essay, but really basing his work on Agamben’s notion of biopower. Indeed, Sexton charitably characterizes Mbembe’s necropolitics as a ‘rewriting of Agamben’s rewriting of Foucault’s biopolitics’ (Sexton, 2010: 38). According to Sexton, ‘necropolitics is important for the historicist project of provincializing Agamben’s paradigmatic analysis, especially as it articulates the logic of race as something far more global than a conflict internal to Europe (or even Eurasia)’ (Sexton, 2010: 32). Sexton is certainly right to highlight that Mbembe interprets Foucault’s work through Agamben. However, I argue that Mbembe’s focus on the racialized politics of death makes his work directly accountable to the biopolitical framework developed by Foucault.

This is clear in Mbembe’s essay, where he explicitly picks up on the biological and racial dimensions of Foucault’s concept. Later in the text, Mbembe offers a more accurate – but still incorrect – definition of Foucauldian biopower that emphasizes the sociobiological theme:

Biopower, in Foucault’s work, appears to function by dividing people into those who must live and those who must die. As it proceeds on the basis of a split between the living and the dead, such power defines itself in relation to the biological field – of which it takes control and in which it invests itself. This control presupposes a distribution of human species into groups, a subdivision of the population into subgroups, and the establishment of a biological caesura between these subgroups. Foucault refers to this using the seemingly familiar term ‘racism’. (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 71)

This passage is useful in further correcting Mbembe’s misreading of Foucault. The main problem is that it does not actually match Foucault’s definition of biopower. Strictly speaking, biopower does not divide people into ‘those who must live and those who must die’ – at least, not in the first instance. Indeed, this formulation confuses Foucault’s conception of biopower with his more specific concept of State racism. In Foucault’s broader framework of biopolitics, State racism refers to the way sovereign power combines with biopower to maximize the health of one race by eliminating the supposed biological threat posed by another (Foucault, 2003 [1997]: 254–8). For Foucault, sovereign power is defined by ‘the right to take life or let live’ (Foucault, 2003 [1997]: 241). On the other hand, he claims biopower is defined by ‘the right to make live and to let die’ (Foucault, 2003 [1997]: 241).

In this way, biopower is a modality of power that ‘exerts a positive influence on life’ and ‘that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it’ by ‘subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations’ (Foucault, 1978 [1976]: 137). Biopower, then, does not inherently divide people into those who must live and those who must die, but initially only tries to protect and enhance the health of the population (Foucault, 1978 [1976]: 139; Foucault, 2003 [1997]: 239–54). According to Foucault, this process certainly does involve the differential valuation of life (Foucault, 1978 [1976]: 144). However, in the first instance, this merely serves as a motivation ‘to “make” live and “let” die’ or, to use another of Foucault’s formulations, ‘to foster life or disallow it to the point of death’ (Foucault, 2003 [1997]: 241; 1978 [1976]: 138). By contrast, for Foucault, the power to make live and make die simultaneously only emerges through the superimposition of sovereign power and biopower, which manifests in the form of State racism (Foucault, 2003 [1997]: 254–8).

To fully grasp what Foucault means by ‘State racism’, we first need to clarify his understanding of ‘racism’ more generally. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault develops a genealogy of racism that makes important distinctions between three different terms: ‘race war’, ‘racism’, and ‘State racism’. For Foucault, the term ‘race war’ or ‘race struggle’ refers to the 16th and 17th-century European discourse that conceives of society as a conflict between different social groups – a conflict that endures even under conditions of peace and order (Foucault, 2003 [1997]: 43–81). By contrast, Foucault thinks we should reserve the term ‘racism’ for a very specific historical transformation of this earlier discourse of race war (Foucault, 2003 [1997]: 241). According to Foucault, this newer ‘racism’ is ‘far removed from the ordinary racism that takes the traditional form of mutual contempt or hatred between races’ and is only ‘born at the point when the theme of racial purity replaces that of race struggle’ (Foucault, 2003 [1997]: 241). Indeed, Foucault thinks this ‘racism’ is best described as a ‘reworking’ of this earlier discourse in ‘sociobiological terms’ and that it was designed to serve ‘the purposes of social conservatism and, at least in a certain number of cases, colonial domination’ (Foucault, 2003 [1997]: 241). In other words, it is what we would today call ‘scientific racism’ or ‘biological racism’.

The transformation of race war into biological racism is the condition of possibility for the third notion, which is the one of greatest relevance to my discussion: State racism. Foucault defines State racism as the centralization of biological racism within the state apparatus (Foucault, 2003 [1997]: 82). For Foucault, State racism is a form of racism that society directs ‘against itself, against its own elements and its own products. This is the internal racism of permanent purification’ (Foucault, 2003 [1997]: 63). In this way, Foucault suggests that biological racism enacts a significant transformation in the way sovereign power is exercised, insofar as the sovereign right to kill now functions through and is justified by biopolitical considerations around the health of the supposedly dominant race (Foucault, 2003 [1997]: 241, 254–8). In other words, Foucault argues that modern sovereign power has increasingly come to function through a racist biopolitical governmentality: ⁴

In the biopower system . . . killing or the imperative to kill is acceptable only if it results not in a victory over political adversaries, but in the elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement of the species or race. There is a direct connection between the two. In a normalizing society, race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable. (Foucault, 2003 [1997]: 256)

Strictly speaking, then, Mbembe is right to say that biopower – in the narrow sense of a specific modality of power – is insufficient to account for the politics of death. However, the same cannot be said for Foucauldian biopolitics as a broader conceptual framework, and thus Mbembe’s critique of Foucault fails at a conceptual level. After all, Foucault does not actually attempt to account for the racialized politics of death through the concept of biopower per se, but rather through the concept of State racism – that is to say, the way the sovereign right to kill is exercised within a racist biopolitical governmentality.

There Is No Such Thing as ‘Necropower’: The Deficiencies of Necropolitics as a Conceptual Framework

All this casts doubt on the supposed deficiencies of Foucault’s framework for accounting for the racialized politics of death. By the same token, this clarification of Foucault’s work should lead us to question what is distinctive or original about Mbembe’s notion of necropower and his broader framework of necropolitics. ⁵ Indeed, I argue that the basic insights of this framework – at least, at a conceptual level – are already covered by Foucault’s notions of State racism and thanatopolitics. Of course, several critics have defended necropower as a distinctive modality of power. According to Duarte, necropower can be distinguished from biopower insofar as it ‘implies the intensive production of mass-scale deaths through planned and calculated actions and discourses’ (Duarte, 2023: 59). Similarly, Rafael suggests that necropower is ‘the other, enabling side of biopower’ that serves as ‘the murderous counterpoint to the biopolitical imperative of administering life’ (Rafael, 2022: 65). Both formulations seem to cohere with Mbembe’s own understanding of the concept (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 92). However, as I will demonstrate, this is precisely why they are unsuccessful in showing that necropower is distinct from biopower. Mbembe’s most cogent presentation of necropolitics comes at the end of his essay:

. . . I have put forward the notion of necropolitics, or necropower, to account for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximally destroying persons and creating death-worlds, that is, 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, 2019 [2016]: 92)

From this passage, we can see that Mbembe identifies necropower with techniques of sovereign power such as military force and the right to kill. In a different part of the essay, he also emphasizes the sovereign technique of territorialization (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 79–83). Of course, for Mbembe, the use of these techniques of sovereign power is guided and augmented by biological racism, which is obviously connected to techniques of biopower such as population measurement and normalization (Foucault, 1978 [1976]: 139–46; Foucault, 2003 [1997]: 243–5). In other words, necropower is really just the superimposition of sovereign power and biopower. At this point, it becomes clear that there is actually no such thing as ‘necropower’ insofar as it lacks any novel techniques of power that are genuinely its own. Indeed, my contention is that necropower is simply the exercise of sovereign power through the prism of a racist biopolitical governmentality. In this way, it is nothing more than a new label for a phenomenon already identified within Foucault’s framework of biopolitics: namely, State racism.

Mbembe’s emphasis on the connection between racism and techniques of sovereign power can be seen in his analysis of colonialism. According to Mbembe, early modern colonial occupation ‘consisted in seizing, delimiting, and asserting control over a geographical area – of writing a new set of social and spatial relations on the ground’ (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 79). Mbembe refers to this process of writing new spatial relations as ‘territorialization’ (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 79). According to Mbembe, this process operates through ‘the exercise of sovereignty’ but in a way that is guided by racism (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 79). After all, ‘territory’ is one of the paradigmatic techniques of sovereign power (see Foucault, 2009 [2004]: 64–5). A major highlight of Mbembe’s essay is his discussion of how the ‘late modern colonial occupation’ of Gaza and the West Bank differs from early modern colonial techniques of territorialization. Indeed, he explores how these occupations are characterized by ‘three major characteristics’: vertical sovereignty, splintering occupation, and infrastructural warfare (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 80–3). These empirical insights are profoundly valuable, but all of them operate at the level of historical detail rather than conceptual innovation. Ultimately, all three of these developments can be accounted for as techniques of sovereign power that have been employed within a racist biopolitical governmentality, which now aims at inflicting death and destruction to the advantage of the privileged racial group. This same basic logic can also be seen at play in other death-worlds that Mbembe discusses in the essay, such as the plantation, the concentration camp, and the contemporary warzone.

If there is no such thing as necropower, this raises difficult questions about what is left of Mbembe’s broader framework of necropolitics. Setting aside the supposedly distinctive techniques of ‘necropower’, there have been several other efforts to demarcate necropolitics from biopolitics among those who have tried to operationalize Mbembe’s framework. Quinan and Thiele argue that necropolitics can be distinguished from biopolitics insofar as death has, at least in certain contexts, overtaken life as the main target of power. They claim that necropolitics:

. . . is much more concerned with how life is subjugated to the power of death. Thus, rather than showing how life and death are both structuring instruments of power (as if in a relation of equivalence), necropolitics asks about the asymmetrical conditioning of who gets to live and who must die. While Foucault keeps a certain conceptual distance, Mbembe emphasizes that they are no longer an even pair. Death, making die, is what structures living. (Quinan and Thiele, 2020: 3)

However, this attempt to demarcate necropolitics from biopolitics is inadequate. After all, Foucault does not claim that life and death are always an ‘even pair’ within the broader framework of biopolitics. This is clearest in Part Five of The Will to Knowledge, where Foucault examines how biopower has fundamentally transformed the sovereign right to kill (Foucault, 1978 [1976]: 134–59). Foucault claims that ‘the right of life and death is a dissymmetrical one’ within both ancient and modern forms of sovereign power (Foucault, 1978 [1976]: 136). According to Foucault, the pre-biopolitical sovereign ‘exercised his right to life only by exercising his right to kill’ and therefore this supposed ‘power of life and death’ was nothing more than ‘the right to take life or let live’ (Foucault, 1978 [1976]: 136). By contrast, biopower exercises power over life insofar as it attempts to administer, optimize, and multiply it, and thus is also dissymmetrical insofar as it tries to produce and protect life while minimizing death (Foucault, 1978 [1976]: 137). However, Foucault argues that modern sovereign power has been fundamentally altered by the advent of productive forms of power such as biopower (Foucault, 1978 [1976]: 136–7; 2003 [1997]: 241, 254–6). This leads him to claim that with these new forms of power, there has also ‘been a parallel shift in the right of death, or at least a tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life-administering power and to define itself accordingly’ (Foucault, 1978 [1976]: 136). This is precisely why, for Foucault, modern sovereign power should be understood as an especially ‘formidable power of death’ that is the ‘counterpart’ to the productive modality of biopower (Foucault, 1978 [1976]: 137). In a 1982 lecture in Vermont, Foucault refers to the deadly counterpart of biopolitics as ‘thanatopolitics’ – that is to say, a politics concerned with the maximization of death within a broadly biopolitical governmentality (Foucault, 2000 [1988]: 416). ⁶

Duarte defends a reformulated version of Quinan and Thiele’s argument, suggesting that ‘necropolitical powers operate by reverting the priorities between life and death in order to better favor death’ (Duarte, 2023: 60). According to Duarte, the ‘exercise of necropolitical powers’ reduces the importance of the ‘distinction between life and death’ insofar as death is ‘transformed into an end in itself’ (Breu, 2020: 505; Deutscher, 2017: 103; Duarte, 2023: 60; Islekel, 2022: 3; cf. Puar, 2007: 33). Similarly, Deutscher suggests that necropolitics ‘is not necessarily subordinated to the putative “vital” ends associated with biopolitical direct and indirect murder’ (Deutscher, 2017: 103). ⁷ For Deutscher, this is what distinguishes necropolitics from Foucault’s notion of thanatopolitics (Deutscher, 2017: 103). I argue that these claims are also mistaken. After all, biological racism – and related forms of biopolitical discrimination based on theories of ‘abnormality’ or ‘degeneracy’ – are critical to understanding the contemporary politics of death, and these forms of discrimination presuppose one population whose life must be preserved and another population that must be subjected to death (Foucault, 2003 [1997]: 255). Mbembe himself states that ‘to a large extent, racism is the driver of the necropolitical principle insofar as it stands for organized destruction’ and ‘a sacrificial economy’ that relies on ‘a generalized cheapening of the price of life’ and ‘a habituation to loss’ (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 38). In this way, the racialized politics of death exercises power over life based on a distinction between lives that are considered valuable and lives that are determined to be worthless. Therefore, the racialized logic of necropolitics would lose all coherence without this emphasis on the preservation of a certain kind of life. Indeed, when it comes to the question of race, neither life nor death can be given absolute priority over the other or, as Duarte claims of death, made into ‘an end in itself’. After all, each concept already presupposes the other through the differential valuation of life. Without this differential valuation of life predicated on preserving one population at the expense of another, it is hard to see any clear motivation for the maximization of death. Therefore, the supposed shift in emphasis made by Mbembe has been greatly overstated and does not indicate anything truly novel in his work at a conceptual level.

Mbembe’s Conceptual Innovations: The Analytical Value of Death-Worlds and the Living Dead

So far, I have argued that Mbembe’s conceptual framework of necropolitics cannot be successfully demarcated from Foucauldian biopolitics. However, Mbembe does make important contributions to the framework of biopolitics, and offers genuine correctives to Foucault’s work at an empirical level. Mbembe rightly highlights Foucault’s relative lack of attention to colonialism and slavery – which are, of course, two extremely important chapters in the historical development of biological racism (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 76). ⁸ Furthermore, Mbembe does offer two genuinely original concepts through his notions of death-worlds and the living dead (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 92). At a basic level, the idea of death-worlds helps to frame the diverse ways in which racialized violence manifests within different contexts and interacts with sovereign power, while the category of the living dead helps to conceptualize the specific kinds of political exclusion that derive from biological racism. Admittedly, these concepts are only explicitly named at the very end of Mbembe’s essay, and thus do not receive as much conceptual development as they require to be made truly distinctive and convincing. Nonetheless, these ideas are useful insofar as they extend or thematize elements already present in Foucault’s analysis. In this way, they allow us to generate and better organize certain empirical insights.

Mbembe defines death-worlds as ‘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, 2019 [2016]: 92). Mbembe discusses five specific types of death-worlds: the plantation, the concentration camp, the late modern colony, the system of apartheid, and the contemporary warzone. I argue that this concept is extremely useful in capturing the singularity of each of these contexts. After all, the relationship between sovereign power, biopower, and racialized violence is constituted differently in each case. In particular, the concept of death-worlds helps to frame Mbembe’s insights into the way biological racism shapes political violence that exceeds sovereign power. Furthermore, this notion is useful in conceptualizing the specific forms of violence that characterize (post-)colonial contexts, especially those of post-colonial Africa. Indeed, Mbembe’s work succeeds in bridging the conceptual framework of biopolitics with the traditions of postcolonialism and Afropessimism (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 78–83, 161–3; Patterson, 1982: viii–ix; Sexton, 2010; Wilderson, 2010). ⁹ On this front, one instructive example is his analysis of apartheid in South Africa, which provides a wealth of insight into precisely how sovereign power was exercised both within a specific post-colonial African context and through a racist biopolitical governmentality (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 79–80). However, perhaps his most original contribution concerns the relationship between biological racism and organized non-state violence. As Rouse rightly argues, Mbembe’s work is extremely valuable in theorizing the role of non-state actors in the constitution of specific death-worlds (Rouse, 2021: 362–3). Mbembe offers two main examples of non-state actors in his essay: what he terms ‘war machines’ and suicide bombers (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 83–92).

For Mbembe, war machines ‘are made up of segments of armed men that split up or merge with one another, depending on the tasks to be carried out and the circumstances involved’ (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 85). According to Mbembe, this concept is especially useful in understanding the singularity of post-colonialism in Africa (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 84–7). He rightly argues that in Africa, ‘the political economy of statehood dramatically changed over the last quarter of the twentieth century’ and that ‘many African states can no longer claim to hold a monopoly on violence or on the means of coercion within their territory’ (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 85–7). In terms of examples of war machines, Mbembe cites ‘urban militias, private armies, armies of regional lords, private security firms, and state armies’ which ‘all claim the right to exercise violence or to kill’ (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 84). Speaking in this broad context of post-colonial Africa, Mbembe writes:

Increasingly, war is no longer waged between the armies of two sovereign states but between armed groups that act behind the mask of the state against armed groups that have no state but control very distinct territories, with both sides having as their main targets civilian populations that are unarmed or organized into militias. (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 87)

Although Mbembe’s essay does not make this point sufficiently clear, it is important to acknowledge that the targeting of civilian populations in such contexts is guided by distinctly biological forms of racism. Mamdani has shown how genocidal violence in places like Rwanda and the Darfur region of Sudan has been shaped by the categories of biological racism introduced by European colonialism (Mamdani, 2001: 9–14, 76–102; 2009: 145–70). Indeed, the relevant racial divisions in both conflicts are unintelligible without the colonial ‘master categories’ of ‘race’ and ‘tribe’ that were used to classify, divide, and regulate the colonized population (Mamdani, 2009: 146; 2012: 46–53). Genocidal violence in these contexts was subsequently rationalized on the basis of these racialized categories. For example, Mamdani argues the Rwandan genocide needs to be understood as what he refers to as a ‘natives’ genocide’ – that is to say, a genocide in which one racial group attempts to exterminate another based on the latter’s perceived identity as colonial settlers (Mamdani, 2001: 13–14). As he rightly explains, the militias of Hutu extremists rationalized their genocide against the Tutsi minority by constructing them ‘as a privileged alien settler presence’ (Mamdani, 2001: 14). This construction was made on the basis of the racialized distinction between Hutu and Tutsi originally established by Belgian colonialism, which ‘constructed Hutu as indigenous Bantu and Tutsi as alien Hamites’ (Mamdani, 2001: 16). In this way, we can see that genocidal practices in such contexts are heavily informed by the racist biopolitical logic of protecting one population by eliminating another, and that this logic is inextricably linked to the biological racism that was created by the West and developed in the colonies (Foucault, 2003 [1997]: 103, 257).

Mbembe’s second example of a non-state actor is that of the suicide bomber, which he discusses in the specific context of the colonial occupation of Palestine (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 88). For Mbembe, the suicide bomber is a figure who raises a series of complex questions about freedom, terror, resistance, sacrifice, and redemption (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 88–92). However, for my purposes, the most important characteristic of this figure is that it represents a form of political violence that is shaped by biological racism but exceeds the technology of sovereign power. At this point, one might wonder whether Mbembe’s emphasis on racialized non-state violence might be sufficient to demarcate necropolitics from biopolitics at a conceptual level. After all, it might appear that these examples are not covered by Foucault’s notion of State racism.

The challenge, then, is to show that these examples of racialized non-state violence can be accounted for within Foucault’s broader framework. Of course, Foucault’s work is empirically limited insofar as it does not provide a detailed historical explanation of how State racism has diffused biological racism throughout the social body. As we have already seen in the case of Rwanda, this is essential to an adequate description of racism in colonial and post-colonial contexts, especially when it comes to racialized forms of violence that are exercised by non-state actors. Nonetheless, Foucault’s existing framework is sufficient to account for such violence at a conceptual level. Indeed, we can account for non-state war machines claiming the sovereign right to kill without making any dramatic revisions to Foucault’s framework. At the level of historical detail, this involves extending Foucault’s analysis of biological racism and its relationship to state power. More specifically, it requires complicating our understanding of the relationship between non-state actors, the biological racism that frequently guides them, and their relationship to state power. After all, while militias are non-state actors, they do appropriate the sovereign right to kill by claiming territory and declaring themselves the supreme authority – or, at least, representatives of the supreme authority. In this way, non-state war machines are easily classified as actors who deploy sovereign power within a racist biopolitical governmentality, but without necessarily attaining the status or broader functions of a state.

On the other hand, suicide bombers do not operate through techniques of sovereign power such as military warfare or territorialization. Instead, as Mbembe observes, they transform their bodies into weapons and, in the process, erase the ordinary distinction between suicide and homicide (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 88–9). However, insofar as suicide bombings are a form of resistance, they are a form that is deeply structured by their relationship to sovereign power. After all, they are motivated by a logic of martyrdom that assumes they are trapped in an asymmetrical conflict with a sovereign power – and, in the case of the colonial occupation of Palestine, one that is based on a differential and profoundly racialized valuation of life. Of course, there is often a religious dimension to this sacrifice as well, epitomized by the promise of eternal life (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 89–90). However, the specific motivation for the sacrifice of suicide – rather than death on the battlefield – is only rendered intelligible through an asymmetrical conflict with a sovereign power that is guided by a racist biopolitical governmentality. Therefore, while the notion of death-worlds is useful for framing the singularity of the contexts in which such actors operate, we simply do not need the conceptual framework of ‘necropolitics’ to cover this ground. In this way, I argue that Mbembe’s work does help to correct for the empirical and historical shortcomings of Foucault’s analysis, but that this amounts to an extension of Foucault’s framework rather than requiring the creation of an entirely new one.

Mbembe’s second original concept is his notion of the living dead. This idea is useful in elaborating a distinctly racialized conception of political death, and in a way that exceeds Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life’. As Brennan has rightly argued, this difference is best understood through the theme of ‘sacrifice’ (Brennan, 2024: 5–9). At first glance, Mbembe’s conception of the living dead might appear to be a simple renaming of bare life and one that echoes Agamben’s own use of the term ‘the living dead’ (Agamben, 1998 [1995]: 83; 1999 [1998]: 41, 44, 54). In this way, one might think Mbembe’s concept merely describes the way vulnerable populations are stripped of their political rights and thus unjustly exposed to insecurity, violence, and death. Agamben identifies his notion of bare life with the Roman figure of homo sacer – the accursed man who has been excluded from the political community and thus can be killed by anyone, but cannot be sacrificed in a religious ritual (Agamben, 1998 [1995]: 83). In other words, it refers to an individual who is exposed to death, but in a way that means the significance of their death partially exists outside the system of sovereignty – although, as previously mentioned, it is paradoxically reinscribed through this very exclusion.

However, as Brennan correctly argues, Agamben’s notion of bare life is unable to adequately account for racialized forms of death and exclusion. Indeed, Brennan rightly claims that because Agamben understands bare life as ‘beyond sacrifice’, he also places this form of exclusion beyond relevant racial divisions that are bound up with the logic of sacrifice (Brennan, 2024: 5–7). This is clear within a racist biopolitical governmentality, where the supposedly inferior race is not simply reduced to ‘bare life’ but is designated as a biological threat to the health and survival of the supposedly superior race. In this way, the racialized subject of death is not, in Agamben’s terminology, the ‘absolute biopolitical substance’ of bare life that is apparently excluded from the political community (Agamben, 1999 [1998]: 156–7). Rather, as Foucault’s notion of State racism has shown in the context of modernity, the destruction of a racial group is intended to preserve the health and purity of a supposedly superior racial population (Foucault, 2003 [1997]: 255–7). Therefore, in some important sense, the supposedly inferior population is ostensibly being sacrificed for the preservation of the supposedly superior one. This makes it a form of life that must not only be excluded from the political community, but must also be positively eliminated within the sacrificial logic of State racism. As Brennan rightly notes, this notion of racialized sacrifice is based on a ‘weak’ sense of ‘sacrifice’ in which something is destroyed in the interest of preserving something else (Brennan, 2024: 8). This contrasts with the ‘strong’ sense of sacrifice as ‘tragic expenditure and conscious offerings in the production of the sacred’ (Brennan, 2024: 8). Nonetheless, the weaker sense of sacrifice is crucial in understanding the racialized politics of death (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 38).

Yet one might still wonder if this racialized conception of the living dead is already present in Agamben’s work. After all, in Remnants of Auschwitz, he does acknowledge that the Muselmann is a distinctly racialized form of bare life (Agamben, 1999 [1998]: 54, 156–7). Of course, Agamben is right to emphasize that the Nazis dehumanized Jewish victims of the Holocaust through the attribution of an undesirable ‘demographic, ethnic, national, and political identity’ (Agamben, 1999 [1998]: 156–7). However, he underplays how this process is motivated by the desire to protect the health and purity of one racial group by sacrificing another. Therefore, Agamben’s approach does not properly account for the racialized sacrifice that is integral to the genocidal logic of State racism (Foucault, 2003 [1997]: 255–7; Foucault, 1978 [1976]: 137). This is precisely the logic that underpins Mbembe’s conception of the living dead and distinguishes it from Agamben’s treatment of the concept.

This notion of racialized sacrifice also helps to dispel concerns that the concept of death-worlds is already covered by Agamben’s analysis of the concentration camp. For Agamben, the camp is the ‘“nomos” of the modern’ – that is to say, it is the site that embodies the ‘state of exception’ he takes as definitive of the modern juridico-political order (Agamben, 1998 [1995]: 166–9). Mbembe builds on this account by attending to ‘figures of sovereignty’ beyond the camp but that similarly aim at ‘the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations’ – that is to say, death-worlds like the plantation and the colony (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 68). Beyond emphasizing the historical importance of these death-worlds in the constitution of the modern nomos, Mbembe’s concept explains how the state of exception actually results in the maximization of death and destruction (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 92). Indeed, he rightly argues that biological racism is the primary cause behind this ‘sacrificial economy’ and is precisely what motivates the suspension of the rule of law within such contexts (Mbembe, 2019 [2016]: 38). In this way, Mbembe shows how the state of exception functions through a racist biopolitical governmentality. In other words, he demonstrates that death-worlds are structured by a racialized form of sacrifice that exceeds a mere reduction to bare life.

The preceding discussion helps to clarify the value of Mbembe’s conceptual innovations and indicates how they should be reflexively operationalized. While these concepts do offer a genuine extension of Foucault’s framework, they do not exceed the basic logic laid down by Foucault. Therefore, they are best understood as immanent contributions to the framework of biopolitics, which, as I have argued, encompasses concepts like State racism and thanatopolitics. In this way, I suggest that death-worlds and the living dead are genuine conceptual innovations that can be operationalized within a biopolitical analysis while leaving behind Mbembe’s proposed framework of necropolitics and his notion of necropower.

Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that Mbembe’s critique of Foucauldian biopolitics is predicated on a fundamental misreading of Foucault’s work. Relatedly, I have demonstrated that what Mbembe refers to as ‘necropower’ is already covered by Foucault’s concepts of State racism and thanatopolitics. I have also shown that subsequent attempts to demarcate necropolitics from biopolitics in the secondary literature have been unsuccessful. This is because they overlook how the racialized politics of death is necessarily conditioned by the differential valuation of life characteristic of biological racism. However, I maintain that Mbembe does offer a genuine extension of Foucault’s framework through his notions of death-worlds and the living dead.