Achille Mbembe published the essay 'Necropolitics' in 2003 in the journal Public Culture; the 2019 Duke University Press book of the same name collects that essay with later work. The original essay is the document that put 'necropolitics' into circulation, and it remains the clearest statement of the argument.
Mbembe's claim is that Foucault's notion of biopower — the twentieth-century state's power to manage the life of populations — does not adequately describe the operation of sovereignty in the colonial and post-colonial world. What contemporary sovereignty exercises, particularly in the spaces produced by late colonialism, is the power to designate which populations may be exposed to death: through war, through deprivation, through the withdrawal of infrastructure, through the production of zones of impunity. He names this necropower.
The argument is documented across specific cases — the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, the colonial wars of twentieth-century Africa, the racialized geography of the U.S. carceral system — and the documentation is what makes the abstract vocabulary land. Mbembe is precise about where and how the power to expose populations to death operates institutionally.
The book reads beautifully in the Steven Corcoran translation. Mbembe is a stylist, and the prose in English (which Mbembe also writes in directly) has the cadence of the French academic essay at its best. Five stars.
Editorial commentary
Achille Mbembe's Necropolitics (2019) is the book-length development of the analytical framework Mbembe introduced in his widely-circulated 2003 essay of the same title. The framework extends Michel Foucault's earlier framework of biopolitics by attending to the corresponding question of how modern political orders manage the biological death of populations they categorize as outside the framework of full political life.
Achille Mbembe is research professor in history and politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg. His work — On the Postcolony (2001), Critique of Black Reason (2017), Necropolitics (2019), Brutalisme (2020), Out of the Dark Night (2021) — has been central to the contemporary international political-theory scholarship on post-colonial state violence and on the relationship between modern political institutions and the populations they categorize as outside political life.
The framework's empirical reference is the contemporary period of extended and routinized violence against populations categorized as security risks or as politically excluded — the populations of occupied territories, of stateless refugees, of slums and informal settlements administered through routinized violence rather than through political-legal incorporation.
The framework draws on Mbembe's earlier work on the post-colonial African state — particularly On the Postcolony (2001) — and on the broader continental tradition of post-Foucauldian political philosophy. Mbembe has been one of the most prominent African political theorists of the post-2000 period; his work is read across multiple disciplinary traditions.
The 2019 Duke University Press translation by Steven Corcoran is the standard English edition. The book has been received as one of the central contemporary contributions to the analytical literature on state violence, on the political theory of exclusion, and on the broader question of how post-colonial political orders relate to the political-theoretical inheritance of European modernity.
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.
Where this archive links to a book purchase, the link routes through Bookshop.org, which directs a share of the purchase price to independent bookstores. Affiliate disclosures are at the foot of every page; the editorial selection is not influenced by the affiliate arrangement.
Editorial commentary
Achille Mbembe's Necropolitics (2019) is the book-length development of the analytical framework Mbembe introduced in his widely-circulated 2003 essay of the same title. The framework extends Michel Foucault's earlier framework of biopolitics by attending to the corresponding question of how modern political orders manage the biological death of populations they categorize as outside the framework of full political life.
Achille Mbembe is research professor in history and politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg. His work — On the Postcolony (2001), Critique of Black Reason (2017), Necropolitics (2019), Brutalisme (2020), Out of the Dark Night (2021) — has been central to the contemporary international political-theory scholarship on post-colonial state violence and on the relationship between modern political institutions and the populations they categorize as outside political life.
The framework's empirical reference is the contemporary period of extended and routinized violence against populations categorized as security risks or as politically excluded — the populations of occupied territories, of stateless refugees, of slums and informal settlements administered through routinized violence rather than through political-legal incorporation.
The framework draws on Mbembe's earlier work on the post-colonial African state — particularly On the Postcolony (2001) — and on the broader continental tradition of post-Foucauldian political philosophy. Mbembe has been one of the most prominent African political theorists of the post-2000 period; his work is read across multiple disciplinary traditions.
The 2019 Duke University Press translation by Steven Corcoran is the standard English edition. The book has been received as one of the central contemporary contributions to the analytical literature on state violence, on the political theory of exclusion, and on the broader question of how post-colonial political orders relate to the political-theoretical inheritance of European modernity.
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.
Where this archive links to a book purchase, the link routes through Bookshop.org, which directs a share of the purchase price to independent bookstores. Affiliate disclosures are at the foot of every page; the editorial selection is not influenced by the affiliate arrangement.