Michel Foucault gave us the concept of biopower—the idea that modern states govern by managing life itself, regulating populations through healthcare, hygiene, and demographic control. This was a powerful insight into how power operates not through spectacular violence but through the quiet administration of living.

But something crucial remains unexplained. What about the drone strikes, the refugee camps, the zones where human life is rendered expendable? Foucault's framework, developed primarily through European experience, struggles to account for how sovereignty still expresses itself through death—not as an exception to modern governance but as its ongoing companion.

This is where Achille Mbembe intervenes. His concept of necropolitics doesn't replace Foucault but extends him, drawing on the colonial archive to show that the power to kill and let die remains central to contemporary political life. The question isn't just who gets to live well—it's who gets marked for death.

Foucault argued that sovereign power—the classical right to take life or let live—was gradually replaced by biopower, which focuses on making live and letting die. Modern states optimize populations rather than executing subjects. Power becomes productive rather than merely repressive.

This analysis was developed through European institutions: the prison, the clinic, the asylum. Foucault acknowledged racism as the mechanism that permits killing within biopolitical regimes, but his treatment remained relatively abstract. The colonial context appeared as an afterthought rather than a constitutive element.

Mbembe argues this is a significant blind spot. The colonies were never primarily about making live—they were laboratories for techniques of death and destruction that would later return to Europe. The concentration camp didn't emerge from nowhere. It had precedents in colonial administration, where entire populations could be designated for elimination without this contradicting the logic of governance.

What's missing from Foucault, Mbembe suggests, is adequate attention to the production of death as a form of sovereignty in itself. Not death as the limit of power, but death as power's expression. Some forms of contemporary politics cannot be understood through the lens of population management—they require a framework that takes seriously the deliberate creation of death-worlds.

Takeaway

Biopower explains how modern states manage life, but it struggles to account for zones where death remains the primary instrument of rule—supplementation is required, not replacement.

Mbembe's central claim is that colonial violence isn't historical—it's structural. The techniques developed for governing colonized populations didn't disappear with formal decolonization. They migrated, adapted, and found new applications. The occupied territories, the border zones, the urban ghettos: these spaces operate through logics first perfected in colonial contexts.

The colony, Mbembe argues, represented a state of exception made permanent. Normal legal and moral constraints didn't apply. Colonized peoples were positioned outside the category of the human, making their deaths administratively invisible. This wasn't a failure of the civilizing mission—it was its operational logic.

Contemporary necropolitics inherits this structure. When populations are deemed threats to be managed rather than citizens to be governed, colonial rationality persists. The language changes—security, counterterrorism, migration management—but the underlying logic of dividing humanity into those who count and those who don't remains intact.

This isn't about individual racism but about racial reasoning embedded in institutions, policies, and spatial arrangements. Certain bodies can be detained indefinitely, bombed from afar, left to drown at sea. The decision isn't arbitrary—it follows predictable patterns that trace colonial histories. Mbembe forces us to see the present as the colonial present, not its aftermath.

Takeaway

Colonial violence didn't end—it adapted. Recognizing contemporary politics as continuous with colonial rationality reveals patterns invisible to frameworks that treat colonialism as past.

Perhaps Mbembe's most disturbing contribution is the concept of death-worlds—spaces where populations are subjected to conditions that render them living dead. Not killed outright, but consigned to a form of existence that cannot be called life. The refugee camp, the blockaded territory, the economically abandoned zone.

These aren't accidental outcomes but produced through specific technologies. Infrastructure is destroyed but evacuation is blocked. Medical supplies are restricted but disease is allowed to spread. The line between life and death is deliberately blurred. Populations are kept alive enough to suffer but denied the conditions for flourishing.

This challenges how we typically think about violence. Necropolitical violence isn't always spectacular—it can be infrastructural, administrative, atmospheric. It operates through the withdrawal of resources as much as the deployment of weapons. It transforms entire regions into spaces where death is the defining horizon of existence.

What emerges is a form of sovereignty that expresses itself not through the occasional decision to kill but through the ongoing management of proximity to death. Some populations live with drones overhead, checkpoints at every turn, their fundamental vulnerability built into the landscape. Mbembe names what liberal frameworks struggle to articulate: there are zones where politics is organized around the production of death, not life.

Takeaway

Death-worlds aren't places without governance—they're spaces where governance operates through maintaining populations in states of living death, blurring the line between life and its absence.

Mbembe doesn't ask us to abandon Foucault but to recognize what his framework couldn't see from where he stood. The view from the colony reveals dimensions of power that remain invisible from the metropole. Biopower is real, but it coexists with necropower—sometimes in the same state, applied to different populations.

This has implications beyond academic debate. If contemporary politics includes zones organized around death-dealing, then responses focused solely on improving life management miss the point. Different analytics require different interventions.

What Mbembe ultimately offers is a refusal of innocence—a demand that we see the death-worlds that make other forms of life possible, the colonial continuities that structure the present. The question isn't whether necropolitics describes our world. It's what we do once we recognize it does.