Have you ever noticed how an airstrike in Mumbai triggers national outrage, but a similar attack in Kashmir rarely breaks through the noise? We’re so accustomed to hearing about violence there that it barely feels like news. It’s as if deaths in these regions are already anticipated and normalised. These aren’t just accidents of geography. They are symptoms of a deeper system, a politics that decides whose lives are worth grieving and whose deaths are simply part of the landscape.
Necropolitics is the use of political power to determine who is allowed to live and who can be made to die. It describes how states and institutions manage death by exposing certain populations, such as refugees, the poor, or racialised communities, to violence, abandonment, or structural neglect.
Coined by Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe in a 2003 essay and later expanded in his book Necropolitics (2019), the concept builds on Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics but shifts the focus. While biopolitics is concerned with managing life and populations, necropolitics interrogates the power to let people die, deciding who is disposable, who may be sacrificed, and whose suffering is structurally ignored.
Biopolitics versus necropolitics
Foucault traces how the organisation of power changed over time: from sovereign power, where rulers exercised authority through public spectacles of death, to disciplinary power, which works through institutions like schools and prisons to train individuals using surveillance and routine. This evolved into biopower — the control of entire populations through the optimisation of life via vaccination, sanitation, census-taking, and reproductive governance. Biopower appears progressive, but as Foucault warned, it carries within it the power to “make live and let die.”
Mbembe takes this further. He asks: if biopolitics is truly about preserving life, why are so many still dying? Why are certain lives treated as expendable? Biopolitics tells only half the story. The other half is necropolitics, the deliberate exposure of certain populations to death, not by accident but by design. While biopolitics governs life, necropolitics governs death. It does not merely ignore suffering; it produces it with calculated precision. Necropolitics is not about letting people die, but about making them die.
Unlike sovereign power, necropolitics does not rely on the will of a single ruler. It operates through policies, institutions, and global indifference that erases the value of some lives. These lives are stripped of dignity, reduced to statistics, and rendered disposable. This logic, Mbembe argues, has deep colonial roots. Consider the Bengal famine of 1943. Millions died not due to a lack of food, but because British colonial policies prioritised imperial interests over Indian lives. Death was systemic, not accidental. People were treated as tools for the empire, valued only in relation to others’ survival.
In necropolitical systems, people are not killed through spectacle but through slow, structural abandonment. Death is normalised and bodies become data. The people, whether in borders, refugee camps, or detention centres, are managed, contained, and forgotten. For instance, during the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ’90s, queer people, especially Black, brown, trans, and working-class individuals, were abandoned by healthcare systems and denied dignity. As scholars like Judith Butler and Jasbir Puar note, only queer lives made respectable through whiteness or middle-class identity were grieved.
Puar calls this queer necropolitics, where some queer lives are protected while others are left to die.
Characteristics of necropolitics
Necropolitics operates through several defining features that together create a system where certain lives are systematically devalued. First, state terror suppresses dissent through surveillance, violence, imprisonment, or elimination, even within democracies. Second, states collaborate with private militias or criminal groups, blurring the line between state and non-state violence. Third, enmity becomes a governing principle, making the right to kill a measure of authority. Fourth, war and terror become self-sustaining economies, fuelling global surveillance and arms markets. Fifth, active predation of certain social groups displaces entire communities, as seen in resource extraction projects. Sixth, death is administered in varied forms like torture, drone strikes, starvation, and disappearance. Finally, these acts are morally justified through ideologies like nationalism, religion, or utilitarianism.
Creating a state of exception
Necropolitics is sustained not only through violence but through the systematic invention of enemies. Modern states are driven by the desire for an enemy onto whom fear and blame can be projected. This enemy need not be real — the fantasy alone justifies surveillance, exclusion, and elimination. In neoliberal regimes, the threat turns inward, prompting expanded policing and emergency laws that target not just the accused but also those who resemble them.
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls this condition the state of exception, when the law suspends itself in the name of preserving itself. Mbembe expands this to show how, for many populations, the exception is not temporary but permanent.
In such spaces, legality becomes hollow and rights are applied selectively. What governs is not justice but logistics, such as who gets care, who receives compensation, who can cross a border, and who is punished for trying. These decisions may seem administrative, but they are deeply necropolitical, revealing how life and death are unequally distributed.
The living dead
Mbembe also introduces a haunting concept within necropolitical thought — the living dead: people who are not killed outright but are forced to live in conditions so degraded, unstable, and violent that life becomes a slow, continuous dying. These are individuals and communities who may remain biologically alive but are stripped of political, social, and moral recognition.
We saw this during India’s COVID-19 lockdown, when migrant workers were left to walk for days without food, shelter, or transport. Many collapsed and died on highways or railway tracks, not from the virus, but from state neglect. Their deaths were quietly processed and bureaucratically explained and largely unmourned.
Mbembe calls these zones death worlds — spaces where populations are exposed to abandonment or sudden violence. Drawing from Agamben’s “state of exception,” Mbembe shows how these spaces operate outside the usual rule of law. Here, death is not a breakdown of governance but its very method.
Gaza is one of the starkest examples. After the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, Israeli strikes flattened hospitals, aid centres, and homes. Even the deaths of children were dismissed as collateral damage. The silence that followed reveals necropolitics at its clearest: some deaths are not just permitted but framed as necessary for political strategy and national security.
In everyday life
Necropolitics does not always come with bombs or guns. More often, it takes the form of law, policy, and bureaucracy — sterilisation drives targeting Dalit and Adivasi women, police databases that profile Muslim names or Black people, drone strikes that label civilians as “targets,” or detention centres where children sleep on cold floors. These are not failures of a protective system, but features of one designed to discard.
It also exists in silence — in the world, including states and global institutions — looking away as thousands of civilians, including women and children, are killed in places like Gaza, while the rest of us carry on with our daily lives. Necropolitics is not confined to war zones. It thrives in the slow violence of poverty, caste, racism, and displacement.
So, if power today functions through abandonment and death, what does resistance look like? The goal must not simply be to survive, but to live lives that are recognised, valued, and grieved.
Rebecca Rose Varghese is a freelance journalist.
