Source: The post Necropolitics decides which lives matter and which don’t has been created, based on the article “Necropolitics: who is allowed to live and who may die” published in “The Hindu” on 6th August 2025. Necropolitics decides which lives matter and which don’t.
UPSC Syllabus Topic: GS Paper 1- political philosophies like communism, capitalism, socialism etc.— their forms and effect on the society.
Context: The article explores the concept of necropolitics, which explains how political systems determine whose lives are valued and whose deaths are ignored. Triggered by global apathy toward violence in regions like Kashmir or Gaza, it challenges the politics of selective mourning and systemic abandonment.
Understanding Necropolitics
- Defining Necropolitics: Necropolitics is the political control over life and death, especially targeting marginalised groups. Coined by historian Achille Mbembe, it reveals how states deliberately expose some lives—like refugees, racial minorities, or the poor—to suffering and death.
- From Biopolitics to Necropolitics: Biopolitics, as defined by Michel Foucault, governs life through health and population control. Mbembe extends this, arguing biopolitics fails to explain systemic death. Necropolitics, instead, highlights how power decides who may die and whose suffering is ignored.
- Structural, Not Spectacular: Unlike older sovereign powers, necropolitics is institutional and global. It erases dignity, normalises death, and governs through policies, not public executions. Examples include colonial famines and abandoned populations in camps and slums.
Mechanisms of Necropolitical Control
- Instruments of Violence: Necropolitics uses tools like surveillance, imprisonment, and starvation. States may work with militias or criminal groups. These actions are often justified using nationalism, religion, or utilitarian logic.
- Sustained State Terror: Violence is not momentary but continuous. War and terrorism become economic systems, while targeted groups face structural erasure. Communities may be displaced under the guise of development or security.
- Invisible Deaths: Deaths caused by starvation, medical neglect, or slow violence are not accidents. They are politically managed. For instance, many queer, trans, and working-class people during the HIV/AIDS crisis were left to die, their deaths unacknowledged.
Producing the State of Exception
- Inventing the Enemy: States often invent enemies to justify extraordinary measures. These “threats” enable surveillance and control, turning suspicion into policy. Targets may include people based on religion, caste, or appearance.
- Law Without Rights: In these spaces, legality is suspended. Giorgio Agamben’s idea of the “state of exception” becomes permanent for many. Here, death is not lawlessness but the method of governance.
- Administrative Death: Decisions like who gets aid or who is punished become mechanisms of control. Logistics, not justice, determine who lives with dignity and who dies invisibly.
Living Death and Death Worlds
- The Living Dead: Necropolitics also creates conditions where people live in extreme neglect. Migrant workers during India’s COVID-19 lockdown died from hunger and exhaustion—victims of structural abandonment, not disease.
- Zones of Abandonment: Death worlds are areas where life is unstable and lawless. Gaza, after Israeli strikes in 2023, became one such example. Civilian deaths were dismissed, and silence followed—a clear display of necropolitical thinking.
Everyday Necropolitics
- Bureaucratised Violence: Not all necropolitics uses bombs. Policies like caste-based sterilisation drives, racial profiling databases, and cruel detention practices quietly discard lives under legal cover.
- Global Apathy: Necropolitics thrives in global silence. Even as civilians die in conflicts, the world looks away. The routine acceptance of these deaths reflects how deeply abandonment is embedded in global politics.
- Path to Resistance: The goal of resistance must go beyond mere survival. It should seek lives that are recognised, respected, and mourned—where all deaths are treated as tragedies, not as routine.
Question for practice:
Discuss how necropolitics shapes which lives are valued and which are discarded.
