While in a biopolitical state, human ‘life’ becomes the central subject of sovereign politics, in a necropolitical state administering ‘death’ becomes the main functionality of sovereign power. The necropolitical state subjugates the lives of most people to the power of death. In this context the condition of sovereign power does not depend on moulding life positively and creating ‘bare life’; rather, it is a political, cultural and economic arrangement of structural death: necropolitical power proceeds by a sort of inversion between life and death as if life was merely death’s medium. It ever seeks to abolish the distinction between means and ends. (Mbembe)
Producing large scale death becomes an inevitable part of such a total polity...Such a political settlement can be identified by the phrase ‘secret life, public death’, a large population where life becomes the waiting room for boarding a train called ‘death’. In such a political reality, death is the ‘rule’; life is the ‘exception’. To live here means to escape death as long as you can. As Achille Mbembe noted, necropolitics also refers to a death-world, a form of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead. (Mbembe).
Some signature features of such a political regime are: unprecedented state horror, a society of violence where the state does not hold the monopoly of violence, rather, state violence is reproduced throughout the society, the commodification of war or warlike situations, predation and dispossession of natural resources and communities in the name of ‘development’, different modes of killing, concentration camps, ghettos, enclaves, creating less than human humans (consider, for example, the plight of and systematic racism against the Rohingya in Bangladesh). To sum up, as per Antonio Pele, necropolitics implies a closed entrenchment of political, economic and military devices, oriented towards the elimination of human populations. But, along with this aspect, necropolitics is also deployed through “small doses” of death that structure the everyday life of individuals.
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