The Power of Debilitation: Jasbir Puar's Challenge to Biopolitics in The Right to Maim

Jasbir K. Puar’s 2017 monograph, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, offers a profound theoretical intervention into how contemporary state power manages and controls populations. Extending and complicating Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics (the power over life), Puar argues that alongside the right to kill, modern, racialized states now possess a strategic "right to maim." This power operates not through mass death, but through the production of chronic injury, social precarity, and systemic debilitation, thereby transforming certain bodies into sites of exploitable and contained life.

The foundation of Puar’s thesis lies in the crucial distinction she draws between disability and debility. Disability, in Puar’s framework, is often a liberal, legally recognized category (like the one established by the Americans with Disabilities Act) that offers entitlements and is framed as an individual, exceptional misfortune. Debility, by contrast, is a mass phenomenon—a structural and slow form of bodily injury and social precarity inflicted by chronic economic, political, and environmental violence. Debility is the product of racialized capitalism and settler colonialism, making certain populations perpetually available for exploitation and precarity. By focusing on disability rights and inclusion, liberal governance obscures and even enables the broader, systemic process of mass debilitation.

Puar posits the "right to maim" as a crucial, new vector of state control. Foucault’s biopolitics is traditionally defined by the binary "make live and let die." Puar, using Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics (the power to dictate who must die), refines this framework. Maiming, which inflicts injury but strategically withholds death, functions as a "will not let die/will not make die" mechanism. This power keeps targeted populations in an interstitial state of protracted injury and non-lethal, slow decline. This chronic debilitation serves a dual purpose: it incapacitates immediate resistance while preserving the injured bodies in an exploitable condition, often masked by an image of humanitarian restraint.

The book’s most controversial and critical section is its detailed case study of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Puar demonstrates how the Israeli military apparatus deploys the "right to maim" through documented policies of "shooting to cripple," primarily targeting the lower limbs of Palestinian protestors and civilians. This tactic ensures mass permanent injury rather than immediate fatality, which enables the state to maintain a humanitarian façade (by keeping death tolls lower) while fundamentally crippling the population’s capacity for political and physical resistance. Furthermore, this deliberate physical and infrastructural violence (such as attacks on water, electricity, and health services) contributes to widespread, intergenerational debility, reinforcing colonial control.

Ultimately, Puar’s The Right to Maim is a powerful call to rethink how we understand both violence and resistance. It forces scholars and activists to look beyond the binary of life and death and recognize the strategic, systemic deployment of injury. By foregrounding the concept of debility, Puar argues that true disability justice must address the structures that produce mass precarity in the first place. The book remains a foundational text for understanding how modern governance mobilizes injury to control populations globally.

Gemini