Necropolitics: The Politics of Death, Disposability, and Abandonment

Why in the News?

1. Recent violence in Gaza and the global silence around civilian deaths have raised concerns about how some lives are treated as less valuable.
2. The idea of “necropolitics” is being discussed more to understand how governments decide who gets care and who is left to die.
3. Events like India’s migrant crisis during COVID-19 show how certain groups are often ignored or abandoned by the state.

Key Highlights

1. Origin and Theoretical Foundations
   1. The term “Necropolitics” was introduced by Achille Mbembe in a 2003 essay and expanded in his 2019 book.
   2. It builds on Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, which refers to the state’s role in managing populations through life-enhancing policies like sanitation, vaccination, and reproduction.
   3. While biopolitics governs life, necropolitics governs death, focusing on how the state decides whose lives are protected and whose are rendered disposable.
2. From Biopolitics to Necropolitics: A Shift in State Power
   1. Foucault had warned that biopower, even while promoting life, contains the power to “make live and let die.”
   2. Mbembe extends this critique, arguing that some populations are not just let to die, they are made to die through structured abandonment, war, neglect, or state terror.
   3. Unlike older forms of sovereign power that are executed through spectacle, necropolitics kills silently, through policies, legal exclusions, and structural violence.
3. Historical and Contemporary Examples
   1. Bengal Famine (1943): Millions died not from food shortage, but from British colonial policies that prioritised imperial logistics over Indian lives — death became systemic, not accidental.
   2. HIV/AIDS Crisis: Queer groups, especially Black, brown, trans, and working-class individuals were neglected by healthcare systems during the HIV/AIDS crisis of 1980s and 1990s; only those conforming to “respectable” identities were grieved.
   3. COVID-19 Lockdown in India: Migrant workers were forced to walk hundreds of kilometres without food or shelter, many dying unnoticed, a stark example of state neglect turning into death.
   4. Gaza Bombings (2023): Deaths of civilians were treated as necessary for national security, exposing how some deaths are institutionalised and morally justified.
4. Key Features of Necropolitics
   1. State Terror: Use of violence, surveillance, imprisonment, or elimination to suppress dissent.
   2. State–Non-State Collusion: Governments often outsource violence to private militias or criminal networks.
   3. Construction of Enemies: Political identity is forged by projecting threats onto racial, ethnic, or religious others.
   4. War as Economy: Perpetual conflict fuels global surveillance, arms markets, and state legitimacy.
   5. Active Predation: Exploitation of marginalised groups (e.g. tribal displacement for resources) becomes normalised.
   6. Death by Policy: Through drone strikes, starvation, torture, and “disappearances,” death is technocratically managed.
5. ‘State of Exception’ and ‘Living Dead’
   1. Drawing from Giorgio Agamben, Mbembe argues that many communities live in a permanent ‘state of exception’, where laws are suspended not temporarily, but indefinitely.
   2. Such communities live in “death worlds”, places where abandonment is governance, not its failure.
   3. The concept of “living dead” describes those who are biologically alive but socially, politically, and morally erased, as seen in refugee camps, detention centres, or caste ghettos.

Implications

1. Devaluation of Human Life
   1. Certain populations (e.g., Dalits, Adivasis, refugees, Muslims, queer people) are not seen as worthy of grief, care, or justice.
   2. Their suffering is structurally produced, not accidental.
2. Transformation of Governance
   1. The state no longer protects; it administers life and death through surveillance, logistics, and selective care.
   2. Bureaucratic decisions about food, transport, or healthcare have become death-determining instruments.
3. Loss of Legal and Moral Frameworks
   1. Law suspends itself in the name of emergency — but the exception becomes the rule for marginalized communities.
   2. Rights become conditional, applied selectively or not at all.
4. Global Hierarchy of Grief
   1. The media and governments respond differently to deaths based on race, class, geography, or religion.
   2. Outrage is reserved for deaths that fit dominant narratives; others are processed as routine statistics.
5. Necessity for Ethical Resistance
   1. The challenge is not just to survive, but to reclaim the right to be recognised, valued, and mourned.
   2. Resistance must fight against invisibility, silence, and dehumanisation.

Challenges and Way Forward

Conclusion

Necropolitics exposes the dark underside of modern governance — where the state no longer simply neglects life, but produces death as a function of control. From Gaza to Indian highways, from caste oppression to racial profiling, the lines between legality, morality, and violence have blurred. The challenge before us is not only to survive such systems, but to resist them with ethics, recognition, and humanity, ensuring that no life is unseen, ungrieved, or reduced to collateral.