Necropolitics

Necropolitics is a sociopolitical theory of the use of social and political power to dictate how some people may live and how some must die. The deployment of necropolitics creates what Achille Mbembe calls deathworlds, or "new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead."^[1] Mbembe, author of On the Postcolony, was the first scholar to explore the term in depth in his 2003 article,^[2] and later, his 2019 book of the same name.^[1] Mbembe identifies racism as a prime driver of necropolitics, stating that racialized people's lives are systemically cheapened and habituated to loss.^[1]

Khaled Al-Kassimi, author of International Law, Necropolitics, and Arab Lives^[3], has recently expanded the theoretical framework of necropolitics by engaging in an epistemic inquiry deconstructing the philosophical and theological reasons as to why Western modernity necessitates deploying "necropower" for onto-epistemic coherence.^[4] In doing so, Al-Kassimi mentions that while racism is a material explanation to the exercise of necropolitics, it is the epistemic schism between both "spiritual Arabia" and "secular Europe" that demands the latter to "ban" the former from the juridical order and render them the "living-dead".^[4] By navigating Latin-European scholastics in the 15th century, including the positivist juridical turn during and after the Enlightenment period emphasizing Reason over Revelation, Al-Kassimi concludes that, "Arab epistemology emphasiz[ing] the spiritual rather than simply the material"^[4] requires "secular" Western modernity to demand the elevation of Arab subjects to the exception and rendering them through technologies of racism and essentialist narratives as "bare-life", "Muselmann", or the "living-dead"; that is, objects of sovereign necropower.^[4]