"It seems to me that there are varying modes of state violence, inflicted on specific categories of populations – Blacks, minorities, women, the most vulnerable – by the police, prisons, military, border guards everywhere. Let’s call it a machinic violence. It is direct, immediate, visible and is often murderous – as we saw with George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The list is endless and it happens to masses of people who are killed, dislocated or expelled.

But we also have another ‘slow’ violence that is more distant, gradual and less perceptible. Here I’m drawing on Rob Nixon’s work who describes a delayed destruction dispersed across time. That’s how I perceive racism.

So we have these two forms of violence – the immediate visible form and the slow and delayed one, that together form an attritional apparatus which attacks not only the body but also the nerves. This apparatus is also more and more technologized, more and more algorithmic.


We are witnessing a worldwide and universal rearrangement of power and discriminatory violence. This leads some to being put to death prematurely and others not. You could also call it security or insecurity as Olufemi has discussed. It also reminds us once again that it was born in colonialism, which was the laboratory in which this modern order was experimented with and developed.

In terms of where it is going, I think the agents of brutalisation have become more decentralized than they have ever been before and more abstract. They still proceed through the traditional apparatuses of the state, such as the police, judicial system, the incarceration system. But beneath this lies the increasing role played by programming, as coercion is technologized.

In the way it redistributes brutality, programming is abstract as it codes people. This isn’t just turning people into numbers, but rather turning them into a code, into data, that can be stored, circulated and also speculated on, including by finance capital. So there is a dematerialization of the state itself, as it cedes some of its functions to these technologies, which may seem neutral but are not. So although, we still have a policeman grabbing a black man in Minnesota and killing him by putting his knee on his neck, destruction of those deemed to be superfluous is also being outsourced to new machines.

So while a kind of decolonization has happened, it doesn’t mean that colonialism has ended. Some parts of the world are still under colonial occupation, places like Kashmir, Palestine and others. But more importantly, coloniality has remained. This is a mode of ruling in which certain people are deemed disposable and yet indispensable. This is how racial rule worked. We need your muscles, your work, but we are also entitled to dispose of you in the way we want. It’s this dialectic of dispensability and indispensability that is accelerating today, leading to a politics of abandonment, a politics of neglect.


Today we can see neoliberalism is in crisis and thus has to rely more and more on an illiberal state to buttress its goals. This means that more and more people will be ruled under the Black Code. More people will be governed as if they were Black people, with all that entails: wanton violence, disenfranchisement, exposure to all kinds of risks, premature death.

This universalisation of the Black code will be going on as the world is burning, the planet is burning, having reached its limits. So because of ecological breakdown, our world is becoming more and more inhospitable to life itself".

Achille Mbembe