I confess that I first came across the notion of ‘necropolitics’ whilst reading the work of a talented colleague, Eileen Yuk-ha Tsang, whose recent article on gay sex workers and Chinese medical care makes use of Mbembe’s concept.
I should add that Tsang’s book China’s Commercial Sexscapes: Rethinking Intimacy, Masculinity and Criminal Justice was also published recently and I was more than happy to endorse this remarkable piece of ethnographic research.
In his volume Necropolitics, published in English in 2019, Mbembe, pioneer of a new wave of Francophone critical theory, offers a novel and grim characterisation of the contemporary world, plagued as it is by extreme and growing inequality, militarisation, enmity and terror, as well as by racist and fascist populisms set on killing. Wars, genocides, refuge crises, ecocide and ubiquitous precarity are evidence that increasing masses of individuals are now being governed via their direct or indirect exposure to death. What we are seeing emerge, he maintains, is ‘democracy’s dark side’, what he calls its ‘nocturnal body’. In an echo of colonial times, war has become ‘the sacrament of our times. Sovereignty annihilates its enemies.
I have only just starting reading his book, so I will not here attempt a full and proper exposition of his ideas, let alone offer a critique of them. Rather, I have just a few thoughts of my own. I want to pick up on Mbembe’s argument that necropolitics entails the ‘subjugation of life to death’, and, in particular, his assertion that we are witnessing the creation of death-worlds, or new and unique forms of social existence in which vast swathes of peoples are being subjugated to conditions of life that confer on them the status of living-dead.
Just a few lines of elaboration before I take off on my theme. Necropolitcs has emerged, Mbembe claims, as a result of three principal factors. First necropolitics entails a ‘necroeconomy’. Contemporary populations cannot be exploited as in the past, so they are managed through their experience of danger and risk. Second, populations are now managed by means of ‘spatial confinement’, especially in camp-form (refugees notably, but extending to prisons, banlieues, suburbs, favelas). These camps are becoming precarious, militatised spaces within which people can be controlled, harassed and potentially killed. And finally, a third characteristic of necropolitics is that can deliver death on a large scale. So necropolitics entails a closed entrenchment of political, economic and military devices oriented to killing, or the elimination of human groups and populations.
But necropolitics is also deployed through ‘small doses’ of death that structure the lives of individuals.
What immediately struck me from this neophyte acquaintance with Mbembe’s work is the concept of the living-dead and its likely applicability to subpopulations and individuals in the era of COVID-19. I am thinking of two sets of phenomena. The first is the predictably and ineluctable abandonment not only of sub-populations in putative ‘developed’ or affluent societies like the UK (where region, class and race in particular come into play), but of whole populations in what is still widely known as the ‘developing world’. Mbembe’s thinking surely resonates here.
The second set of phenomena denotes the effective (though denied) continuation of a policy of ‘herd immunity’ in the Johnson government’s response to COVID-19 (something I have written about before). Were not the ‘confined’ residents of ‘camp-like’ care homes in the UK not enduring a forcibly ascribed status of ‘living-dead’ during the first wave? This is all the more apparent when we are reminded that older people known to be positive for COVID-19 were discharged from hospitals into care homes.
The question I will leave here is this: how far does Mbembe’s society-wide thesis of a new world of necropolitics resonate with people’s localised experiences in care homes in the UK, as well as with the experiences of the refugees in camps that I wrote about in A Sociology of Shame and Blame: Insiders Versus Outsiders. There is, in my view, pause for thought here.
I may well return to Mbembe’s book when I’ve had the opportunity to read on.