Achille Mbembe extended Foucault’s concept of biopower into territory Foucault’s framework could not fully reach.
Foucault had shown how modern power works not primarily through killing but through managing life: regulating bodies, organizing sexuality, administering populations. The modern state is a life-managing apparatus — it makes life productive, healthy, governable. The sovereign’s old right to let live or let die had been supplemented, and largely replaced, by the power to make live and let die: to optimize the life of the population.
Mbembe’s question: what happens where that optimization breaks down? Not where the state fails to manage life adequately, but where it decides that certain lives are not worth optimizing — where the management of life requires deciding who gets to die?
He called it necropolitics. Not the positive face of biopower but its shadow: the sovereign power to decide whose death is acceptable.
The colony as original necropolitical space
Mbembe develops the argument through the colony. In the colony, the two faces of sovereignty that modern political theory had tried to separate — the right to kill and the right to govern — were never separated. Colonial governance required both simultaneously. The colonized population was managed as a productive resource and simultaneously exposed to lethal violence without the legal protections that would apply in the metropolis.
This wasn’t incidental. It was structural. The colony was the space where sovereign power could be exercised without the constraints that legitimacy imposed at home. You could displace populations without property rights applying. You could impose forced labor without labor law applying. You could use lethal violence to maintain order without judicial oversight applying. The colony was defined by the suspension of the norms that applied elsewhere.
Mbembe argues this is not an exception to modern sovereignty. It is its foundation. The sovereign right that underlies modern political order is not, finally, the right to manage life. It is the right to decide whose death is acceptable. The management of life is real and important — but it rests on a prior decision about who counts as life worth managing.
Contemporary necropolitical spaces
The zones where rules don’t apply didn’t end with formal decolonization. Mbembe maps their contemporary forms:
The occupied territory. The West Bank is his most detailed case: a space of Israeli governance where Palestinian movement is controlled by checkpoints, where military authority supersedes civil law, where infrastructure is managed not to optimize Palestinian life but to manage Palestinian threat. Settlements built on expropriated land. Roads that bypass Palestinian towns, connecting settlements to Israel while fragmenting Palestinian geography. The systematic production of unlivability that falls short of formal genocide while achieving many of its effects.
The necropolitical logic Mbembe identifies is the management of a population that has been decided, at the level of sovereign power, to be a threat rather than a productive resource. The response is not extermination — which would invite international consequences — but the production of conditions in which life is perpetually precarious, in which survival requires constant negotiation with the occupying power, in which the conditions of existence are controlled by those who have decided that your existence is a problem.
The prison. Mass incarceration in the United States produced, by the 1990s, a necropolitical space on domestic soil: a system that warehoused, largely out of sight, a population disproportionately composed of Black and Latino men, subjecting them to conditions — violence, disease, mental illness, the permanent loss of employment and civic status — that were understood to be the consequence of incarceration rather than its purpose, but which nonetheless structured life expectancy, family stability, and community capacity for generations. The decision that certain populations would be incarcerated at vastly higher rates than others was a necropolitical decision: a decision about whose life was worth optimizing and whose could be left exposed.
The abandoned neighborhood. The urban geography of American cities, shaped by decades of redlining, disinvestment, and exclusion, produced spaces where the infrastructure of managed life — hospitals, schools, clean air and water, responsive policing, functional housing stock — was systematically absent. Not because of market failure, but because of decisions made at multiple levels of governance about which populations were worth investing in. The result was the same as in the colony: populations exposed to early death, preventable illness, violence, and the compounding disadvantages of living in places that the state had decided were not worth sustaining.
The calculation as news
This changes how you read the news. Every police killing that doesn’t result in prosecution reflects a decision — embedded in law, in prosecutorial discretion, in jury selection, in the structure of qualified immunity — that the officers’ judgment about which lives threatened them supersedes accountability for the lives lost. Every disease outbreak that moves fastest through the poorest neighborhoods reflects prior decisions about which neighborhoods received the infrastructure investment that makes epidemic control possible. Every environmental disaster sited in the territory of communities with least political power reflects an explicit or implicit calculation about whose health and safety is a constraint on industrial activity and whose is not.
These are not system failures. They are the system working as designed — working as a system that has made decisions, at multiple levels, about whose death is acceptable. Necropolitics is not an exception to modern governance. It is the answer to the question of whose life the system is governing.
What the next chapter shows is what communities do with this knowledge — and in these conditions. Which is to say: they keep building.