Necropolitics, Organized Abandonment and the Management of Death

Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics describes the ways modern forms of power extend beyond the governance of life (biopolitics) to encompass the governance of death. In his account, sovereignty is increasingly exercised not only through the ability to kill but also through the capacity to expose populations to states of permanent injury, abandonment, or neglect. Certain groups are relegated to the status of “superfluous humanity”—trapped within systems that sustain them in conditions of slow violence, where existence is reduced to its barest and most precarious form. These “death management systems” preserve populations in states of suffering rather than—and under the guise of—resolving them, ensuring that vulnerability itself becomes a tacit disciplinary mechanism.

As Mark LeVine observes in his commentary on Mbembe, necropolitics highlights the role of extreme violence in sustaining political and economic hierarchies. The right to kill, the ability to orchestrate death, and the relegation of entire communities to precarious life are not anomalies but essential features of contemporary global orders. Violence, in this sense, is not random but systematic, serving to preserve inequality and consolidate power.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore offers a complementary framework with her notion of “organized abandonment.” Here, inequality is enforced less through spectacular violence than through the deliberate withdrawal of resources, opportunities, and protections. Populations are left to languish as capital and the state redirect attention and investment elsewhere while simultaneously investing in various forms of organized violence. Organized abandonment ensures that structural violence continues, even without direct acts of killing, by shaping conditions where survival itself becomes uncertain.

For Wilson Gilmore, abandonment is classed, racialized and spatialized and it’s tied to how surplus populations are managed under shifting regimes of capital accumulation. It is never just a matter of passive neglect; it’s an active political-economic strategy that works in tandem with coercion and containment. While Mbembe emphasizes the sovereign’s power to decide who may live and who must die through overt and sometimes spectacular forms of exposure to death, Gilmore shifts the focus further to the slower, systemic management of surplus life.

California’s prison population increased by 274% since 1970. The US national incarcerated population, while slightly declining from its peak in 2009, remains almost double the early 1990s rate—about 2.1 million people, nearly 1 in 100. Women’s incarceration is nearly 10 times higher than in 1970. This expansion is linked to political choices, such as the 1994 Crime Bill, allocating billions for more policing and prison construction, reflecting disinvestment in community support and reinvestment in control and punishment.

In summary, data on rising incarceration rates, infrastructural neglect, health disparities in marginalized communities, and policy choices confirm Gilmore’s framework of organized abandonment.

Taken together, Mbembe and Gilmore reveal how modern governance sustains itself not only through managing life but also through systematically distributing death, injury, and abandonment. These mechanisms are central to the maintenance of entrenched hierarchies and the production of a disposable humanity.

LLM