Achille Mbembe was born in 1957 in Otélé, a small town in Cameroon, just three years before the country achieved independence from France. This timing matters. Mbembe’s entire intellectual trajectory is framed by the paradox of “freedom” in Africa: states gaining independence formally while remaining trapped in structures of domination. His philosophy is not abstract speculation but forged from a world where the colonial wound still bleeds into everyday life.

Mbembe’s formative years unfolded in post-independence Cameroon, where promises of sovereignty quickly gave way to authoritarianism. The single-party rule of Ahmadou Ahidjo, Cameroon’s first president, operated through surveillance, suppression of dissent, and violent disciplining of bodies. Growing up in this atmosphere, Mbembe witnessed how the rhetoric of liberation could easily collapse into a politics of control. This tension — freedom proclaimed versus domination enacted — would later anchor his critique of power in works like On the Postcolony (2001) and Necropolitics (2003/2019).

Education and Early Formation

Mbembe studied history at the University of Yaoundé before moving to France, where he earned his doctorate in history at the Université de Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne) in 1989. His doctoral thesis examined anticolonial resistance in Cameroon, focusing on how memory, violence, and political imagination intersect in African liberation struggles. This early research foreshadowed his lifelong method: history as more than chronology — as an archive of domination, erasure, and survival.

His training in France exposed him to European intellectual traditions — Michel Foucault’s theories of power and biopolitics, Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, and Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of difference — but Mbembe refused to be simply a disciple. He fused these influences with African political realities, producing a hybrid intellectual stance: rooted in African histories but conversant with global theory. His writing style itself is evidence of this hybridity — dense, poetic, at times deliberately opaque, mirroring the complexities of the colonial encounter.

Career Trajectory

Mbembe’s career has spanned continents. After teaching in Cameroon and France, he worked in the United States at Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Duke University, where he sharpened his interdisciplinary edge in history, political science, and cultural studies. But his intellectual home became South Africa. Since the early 2000s, he has been based at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg, where he is Research Professor in History and Politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER).

South Africa offered Mbembe a laboratory for studying the extremes of modern power. Apartheid was a necropolitical regime par excellence: an entire legal, spatial, and military apparatus devoted to deciding who lived in full humanity and who lived in zones of death. Johannesburg, with its gated communities, sprawling townships, and razor-wire borders, embodied the fractured landscapes Mbembe theorized. His immersion in this environment sharpened his reflections on sovereignty, race, and exclusion.

Major Works

Mbembe’s bibliography is extensive, but two works define his global influence:

• On the Postcolony (2001) — A radical critique of how colonial logics persist in post-independence African states. Mbembe dismantles both Western stereotypes of Africa and romanticized African self-representations, showing how violence, intimacy, and absurdity structure political life after colonialism. The text is known for its vivid, almost visceral prose.
• Necropolitics (essay 2003, expanded book 2019) — His most cited concept. Where Foucault analyzed “biopolitics” (the power to foster life), Mbembe argued that modern sovereignty is defined by the power to dictate death. Necropolitics describes the capacity of states, empires, or technologies to decide who may live in dignity, who must endure “living death,” and who can be killed with impunity.

Other key contributions include Sortir de la grande nuit (2010), Critique of Black Reason (2017), and numerous essays on race, globalization, and the “becoming black of the world.” In these texts, Mbembe expands beyond Africa, treating Blackness as a planetary condition of exposure to violence, precariousness, and exclusion. This universality is what makes his work resonate far beyond African studies — in debates on migration, digital surveillance, and global inequality.

Recognition and Influence

Mbembe is widely regarded as one of the most important living philosophers. His work is translated into multiple languages, taught across disciplines from political theory to media studies, and debated in activist circles. In 2018, he was awarded the Gerda Henkel Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes in the humanities, recognizing his global impact.

His voice matters because he embodies what many postcolonial thinkers strive for: neither provincializing Africa nor universalizing Europe, but generating concepts that emerge from African realities and illuminate the world at large. Concepts like “necropolitics” or “the postcolony” are not bound to Africa alone — they describe conditions in Palestine, Guantánamo Bay, refugee camps, border zones, and algorithmic control systems.

Intellectual Style

Reading Mbembe is a demanding experience. He resists the clarity of textbook definitions, preferring a style that mirrors the fractured, violent, and absurd realities he analyzes. His prose combines historical evidence with metaphor, philosophical argument with literary cadence. Critics sometimes accuse him of obscurity, but his density is intentional: domination itself is complex, layered, and resistant to simplification.

His style also reflects his refusal to allow colonial violence to dictate the terms of thought. Just as colonizers simplified Africa into stereotypes, Mbembe insists that African thought must remain irreducible, poetic, and unruly. The form of his writing is itself a rebellion against colonial epistemology.

Why Biography Matters Here

In the Made2Master framework, biography is not trivia — it is execution context. Mbembe’s life in Cameroon (a state both postcolonial and authoritarian), his education in France (inside the belly of empire), and his career in South Africa (ground zero of racial necropolitics) all shape his philosophical edge. He is not an ivory-tower theorist; he is a cartographer of violence, mapping how sovereignty kills and how people resist.

Understanding his biography equips us to apply his insights today. Mbembe grew up under one-party authoritarianism: we can read his work into modern algorithmic surveillance. He studied colonial archives: we can use his methods to dissect how AI databases reproduce racial profiling. He theorized apartheid: we can extend his necropolitics to digital borders, health access algorithms, and platform governance.

Biography is execution. To know Mbembe’s path is to understand why his concepts cut so sharply into the structures of power we face now.

Key Biographical Dates (Execution Markers)

• 1957 — Born in Otélé, Cameroon.
• 1989 — Doctorate at Université de Paris I, thesis on anticolonial resistance in Cameroon.
• 1990s — Teaching posts in the U.S. (Columbia, UPenn, Duke).
• 2001 — Publishes On the Postcolony, redefining African political thought.
• 2003 — Publishes “Necropolitics” essay in Public Culture.
• 2000s–present — Research Professor at WISER, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
• 2017 — Publishes Critique of Black Reason.
• 2019 — Expanded book Necropolitics consolidates global influence.
• 2018 — Wins Gerda Henkel Prize for contributions to history and philosophy.

Executional Lesson from Biography

Mbembe’s biography shows how philosophy is not detached reflection but lived navigation of domination. His movement — Cameroon → France → U.S. → South Africa — mirrors the circulation of power itself. His concepts were not born in seminar rooms alone but in authoritarian streets, archives of massacre, and landscapes scarred by apartheid.

This makes him invaluable for the digital age. Just as he dissected the “commandement” of colonial power, we must now dissect the commandement of algorithms, databases, and platforms. Just as he mapped apartheid’s necropolitics, we must map digital necropolitics — who the algorithm lets live, who it marks as suspicious, who it erases as data noise.

Mbembe’s biography is therefore not background but blueprint. It is the executional grounding for the framework we will build in Section 10: the Mbembe Digital Sovereignty Framework.

To understand Achille Mbembe’s philosophy, we must first understand how he sees colonialism and its afterlives. For Mbembe, colonialism was never only about territory. It was about commandement — a system of power that reached into every aspect of life, defining who counted as human, who was disposable, and how authority operated. Colonial rule was not merely political domination; it was ontological violence. It classified existence itself, declaring which lives had value and which could be wasted.

Colonialism as Structure, Not Event

Mbembe insists that colonialism is not a past event locked in history books. It is a living structure, a set of logics that persist long after the flag of empire is lowered. Independence movements in Africa removed colonial administrations, but they did not fully dismantle the commandement — the techniques of surveillance, extraction, and arbitrary violence. These forms mutated and persisted in the postcolony.

In On the Postcolony, Mbembe writes that the colonial experience should not be understood only in terms of domination by the West. It should be analyzed as a complex relationship — an “intimate tyranny” where power penetrated daily life, shaping not only politics and economics but also laughter, language, sexuality, and imagination. Colonialism invaded the intimate spaces of subjectivity. It sought not just to rule but to remake human beings into “colonial subjects” — pliant, fractured, half-erased.

The Logic of Commandement

Mbembe’s signature contribution to postcolonial critique is his analysis of commandement, the French word for command or order. Colonial power operated through commandement: a system where authority was arbitrary, excessive, and spectacular. Laws were not stable rules but unpredictable orders that demonstrated the absolute power of rulers. The colonizer’s command was both banal (daily regulations) and extreme (massacres, forced labor, genocidal violence).

This system left behind deep scars. Postcolonial African states often replicated the same arbitrary commandement — authoritarian rule, corruption, violent policing — while claiming to be “sovereign.” The result was what Mbembe calls the postcolony: a political formation where colonial logics persist under new names, producing a mix of parody, absurdity, and violence.

The Postcolony as a Zone of Absurdity

Unlike some earlier postcolonial thinkers who emphasized resistance and liberation, Mbembe emphasized the absurdity of postcolonial life. In the postcolony, power is both grotesque and intimate. Rulers demand obedience but also ridicule themselves through excess. Citizens participate in rituals of domination while mocking them behind closed doors. Everyday life becomes a theatre of complicity, where domination and subversion intertwine.

For example, Mbembe describes how dictators use spectacles of violence — public executions, mass rallies, bizarre decrees — to enforce submission. But citizens also parody these rituals, turning fear into laughter, creating a strange intimacy between oppressor and oppressed. This complicity does not erase domination but complicates it. It shows that colonial and postcolonial power is not a simple binary of domination/resistance. It is a messy entanglement where subjects are simultaneously victims, collaborators, and critics.

Colonial Racism as Ontological Violence

A central part of Mbembe’s critique is that colonialism operated through race as a technology of power. Race was not just prejudice; it was an ontological classification of humanity. To colonize was to declare entire populations “less than human.” This justified enslavement, mass killing, and dispossession. Colonized people were reduced to bodies without political rights, without a voice, without a recognized existence.

In Critique of Black Reason (2017), Mbembe traces how the invention of “the Negro” shaped modernity. He argues that Blackness became the condition against which whiteness defined itself as universal. Colonialism, slavery, and capitalism relied on this racial ordering of the world. Postcolonial states, even when governed by Black elites, often remained trapped in this racialized global system, where Blackness continued to signify disposability.

Colonial Time vs. Postcolonial Time

Another of Mbembe’s insights is his critique of colonial temporality. Colonizers imposed a linear, teleological conception of time: Europe as the future, Africa as the past. This temporal ordering legitimized domination by portraying colonized societies as “behind” on a universal timeline of progress. Independence did not fully escape this trap. Postcolonial states often measured themselves against “development indexes” defined by Western standards.

For Mbembe, postcolonial critique must dismantle this temporal regime. Africa is not “behind.” It is part of a planetary present shaped by entangled histories. Decolonization means breaking free from colonial time, refusing to see Africa as always belated, always catching up, always trapped in mimicry.

Violence as Continuum

Mbembe also challenges the idea that colonial violence ended with independence. Instead, he describes violence as a continuum. Colonial states used forced labor, massacres, and famine as tools of rule. Postcolonial states often inherit the same techniques — arbitrary arrests, disappearances, censorship — sometimes directed against their own populations. Violence, in this view, is not an exception but the normal mode of politics in both colonial and postcolonial formations.

This continuity sets the stage for his later concept of necropolitics: the argument that the ultimate expression of sovereignty is the right to decide who may live and who must die. Colonialism was necropolitical from the start — producing “death worlds” where populations lived in conditions of slow or immediate death. The postcolony, too, is haunted by these death worlds: prisons, refugee camps, ghettos, and zones of abandonment.

Mbembe’s Critique vs. Earlier Postcolonial Thought

Mbembe’s postcolonial critique builds on but also departs from earlier thinkers. Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, emphasized revolutionary violence as a path to liberation. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o focused on decolonizing language and culture. Mbembe agrees with their radical spirit but insists that postcolonial life is more complex than a battle between colonizer and colonized. It is marked by complicity, absurdity, and entanglement. Power is not external but intimate, shaping desires and fantasies.

Where Fanon called for catharsis through violence, Mbembe emphasizes irony and parody. Where Ngũgĩ calls for a return to indigenous languages, Mbembe stresses hybridity — the ways African subjectivity is forged in contact, contamination, and creolization. His critique is less about purity and more about survival in contaminated worlds.

Postcolony as Global Condition

Crucially, Mbembe argues that the postcolony is not unique to Africa. It is a planetary condition. Forms of arbitrary commandement, racialized exclusion, and absurd complicity appear in Palestine, Brazil, the Caribbean, and even in Western democracies. The postcolony is a lens to read modern politics everywhere, not a regional peculiarity.

This universality makes Mbembe’s critique especially powerful in the digital age. When platforms like Facebook or Google operate as unaccountable authorities, issuing opaque commands through algorithms, they echo the logic of colonial commandement. When states confine refugees in camps or prisons, they reproduce postcolonial “death worlds.” The postcolony is not elsewhere; it is here, embedded in global systems of governance.

Executional Application of Postcolonial Critique

For the Made2Master reader, the key is this: Mbembe’s critique equips us with tools to detect hidden structures of domination. Colonial power did not end with decolonization. It mutated into development agendas, security regimes, and digital infrastructures. To execute sovereignty today, we must map how colonial logics operate in new domains:

• In border control, where passports, visas, and biometric data replicate racialized exclusion.
• In global finance, where debt binds postcolonial states into dependency.
• In digital platforms, where algorithms decide visibility, legitimacy, and access.
• In healthcare, where some populations receive world-class medicine while others are abandoned to preventable death.

Mbembe’s postcolonial critique reminds us that these are not neutral systems. They are inheritances of commandement. They are mutations of colonial logics that decide who exists fully and who lives in zones of neglect. Recognizing this is the first step toward resistance.

Executional Lesson from Section 2

Colonialism is not history; it is infrastructure. The postcolony is not only Africa; it is a global condition. Commandement did not vanish; it has been digitized. Mbembe’s critique is therefore not just academic — it is a blueprint for detection. If you can identify where power is arbitrary, excessive, racialized, and absurd, you have located the new postcolony.

This is why Section 2 is essential to our 15,000-word journey. It lays the foundation for Sections 3 and 4, where Mbembe crystallizes these critiques into the concepts of the postcolony and necropolitics. It prepares us to understand how power over life and death is not an anomaly but the hidden operating system of modern sovereignty — and how it extends into digital governance and AI surveillance.

If there is one book that announced Achille Mbembe’s global stature, it is On the Postcolony (2001). This text does not simply analyze Africa after colonialism; it rewrites how we think about sovereignty, intimacy, and absurdity in political life. Where most scholarship on Africa was trapped between pity (“the failed state”) and celebration (“the resilient people”), Mbembe refused both. He insisted that African politics must be understood in its own terms — as a theatre of power marked by excess, parody, violence, and survival.

What is “the Postcolony”?

The “postcolony” is Mbembe’s term for the condition of African states after formal independence. But it is not a neutral descriptor. The postcolony is a paradox: it is both “after” colonialism and haunted by it. It is a space where colonial forms of commandement survive under new guises. It is also a condition of everyday life, where rulers and citizens engage in strange rituals of domination, intimacy, and irony.

Mbembe’s postcolony is not just a political system; it is an atmosphere. It is the air of arbitrariness that saturates power, the grotesque performances of leaders, the laughter and parody of subjects, the sense that violence is always close. To live in the postcolony is to live in a world where domination is not distant but intimate — it enters your body, your home, your language.

Power as Commandement and Banality

In On the Postcolony, Mbembe expands his concept of commandement. Postcolonial power is not the rational, bureaucratic authority imagined in Western political theory. It is arbitrary, excessive, and spectacular. Dictators issue decrees that seem absurd yet deadly. Police enforce laws unpredictably, producing fear and humiliation. Public rituals of loyalty (rallies, parades, songs) blur into comedy, exposing the absurdity of authority.

But the most unsettling part of Mbembe’s analysis is his insistence on intimacy. Power in the postcolony is not only oppressive; it is also familiar, even erotic. Citizens joke about their rulers, mimic their gestures, even desire their excess. This does not mean they approve of domination. It means domination infiltrates daily life so deeply that it cannot be escaped through simple opposition. It is woven into laughter, gossip, and fantasy.

The Aesthetics of Vulgarity

One of Mbembe’s most famous chapters introduces the idea of the aesthetics of vulgarity. In the postcolony, rulers cultivate images of grotesque excess — lavish banquets, gaudy palaces, obscene wealth. Citizens respond with ridicule and parody, turning politics into a vulgar spectacle.

Vulgarity here is double-edged. It is the language of domination (the ruler flaunting obscene power) and the language of subversion (the people mocking the ruler’s vulgarity). This entanglement produces a cycle: rulers display power through excess, citizens parody it, rulers respond with further excess. The result is a political culture saturated by vulgarity — a theatre where domination and ridicule feed on each other.

Death, Violence, and the Everyday

Mbembe also insists that violence in the postcolony is not exceptional; it is routine. Death is always near — in police brutality, in state massacres, in arbitrary disappearances. But this violence coexists with daily survival, with laughter and intimacy. Subjects of the postcolony learn to live with violence as part of the texture of life. They do not passively accept domination, but neither do they escape it. They improvise survival in a world where death hovers constantly.

This normalization of violence is crucial for Mbembe’s later theory of necropolitics. The postcolony is a laboratory where sovereignty reveals its ultimate form: the ability to decide who may live and who may die. But before introducing necropolitics, Mbembe forces us to see how power works in mundane settings — in the laughter at a dictator’s speech, in the gossip about police raids, in the parody of vulgar rulers.

Beyond Victimhood

A radical aspect of On the Postcolony is Mbembe’s refusal to portray Africans simply as victims. He does not deny the violence of colonialism or dictatorship. But he insists that African subjects are active participants in the theatre of the postcolony. They mock rulers, they parody rituals, they negotiate survival. They are complicit and resistant at once. This is not to blame the oppressed but to highlight the complexity of power. Domination is never one-sided. It is always entangled with the creativity and agency of those who live under it.

This perspective is uncomfortable for readers who prefer clear moral binaries. But for Mbembe, the messiness is the truth. Power is not clean. It is vulgar, absurd, and intimate. To understand it, we must look at complicity as well as resistance.

Critique of Western Representations of Africa

Another major contribution of On the Postcolony is its critique of how the West imagines Africa. Western scholarship often depicts Africa as either a site of tragedy (war, famine, corruption) or of noble resilience (ancient wisdom, community spirit). Both are stereotypes that flatten African life. Mbembe insists that Africa must be understood in its complexity — as a site of absurdity, irony, laughter, violence, and creativity.

He also critiques Western temporal frameworks. Africa is often portrayed as “behind” Europe on the road to modernity. Mbembe rejects this. Africa is not behind; it is entangled with global modernity, shaped by the same histories of capitalism, slavery, and empire. The postcolony is not a deviation from modernity but its mirror.

Hybridity and Intimacy

Mbembe rejects the idea that decolonization should return to a pure, precolonial identity. The postcolony is irreversibly hybrid. African subjectivity has been shaped by both indigenous traditions and colonial encounters. The task is not to purify but to survive and create within this hybridity. Intimacy with power, even intimacy with violence, is part of this survival.

This challenges both Western scholars who see Africa as “Other” and African nationalists who seek a pure, decolonized essence. Mbembe insists that postcolonial life is marked by contamination, parody, and improvisation. The goal is not to escape hybridity but to understand and navigate it.

On the Postcolony as Method

On the Postcolony is not just a description of African politics. It is a method of analysis. It tells us to pay attention to laughter, vulgarity, irony, and intimacy — things often dismissed as “non-political.” It shows that domination is sustained not only by violence but also by spectacle, parody, and complicity.

This method is especially powerful when applied beyond Africa. Think of digital platforms: they rule through opaque algorithms (commandement), spectacle (viral content), vulgarity (memes, trolling), and complicity (users participating in their own surveillance). The postcolony is not just about African states; it is a lens for analyzing modern power everywhere.

Criticism of the Book

On the Postcolony has been celebrated but also criticized. Some argue that Mbembe’s focus on vulgarity and complicity downplays resistance. Others claim his dense, poetic style makes the book inaccessible. But these critiques miss the point. Mbembe’s refusal of simple binaries and his complex prose are part of his strategy. He wants to unsettle both colonial stereotypes and simplistic anti-colonial narratives. He wants to show that power is messy, intimate, and absurd — and that analysis must be equally complex.

Executional Application

For execution, the key lesson of On the Postcolony is this: power is sustained not only by violence but also by complicity and spectacle. If you want to resist domination, you must look not only at the police or the dictator but also at the rituals, parodies, and everyday practices that reproduce power.

• In authoritarian states, parody and vulgarity both mock and sustain rulers.
• In digital platforms, memes and trolling both resist and reinforce algorithmic control.
• In global politics, stereotypes of Africa both justify intervention and obscure agency.

The executional move is to map these entanglements, not to flatten them. If you understand how power infiltrates laughter, parody, and intimacy, you can design strategies of resistance that are subtle and effective. If you ignore them, you risk fighting only the surface of domination while leaving its foundations intact.

Executional Lesson from Section 3

On the Postcolony teaches us that domination is vulgar, absurd, and intimate. Resistance must therefore be equally creative, ironic, and improvisational. The postcolony is not just a political formation; it is a method of detection. Apply it to digital governance, to border regimes, to health systems, and you will see how power operates through both violence and complicity. This is the path that leads directly to Section 4: necropolitics — the crystallization of power as the right to decide who lives and who dies.

If On the Postcolony gave us a map of postcolonial absurdity, Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics gave us a weapon. Published first as an essay in 2003 and later as a book in 2019, Necropolitics extends and transforms Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics. Foucault argued that modern sovereignty is about the power to “make live and let die” — to manage populations through health, hygiene, and discipline. Mbembe sharpened this insight: sovereignty, he argued, is ultimately defined not by fostering life but by the power to dictate death.

From Biopolitics to Necropolitics

Foucault’s biopolitics described how states moved from merely killing to managing life. Instead of only exercising the sword, modern power invested in health, population growth, education, and productivity. Mbembe saw the blind spot: who is excluded from this investment in life? Who is not managed but abandoned, enslaved, or killed? Who lives in conditions of slow death rather than life? The answer is the colonized, the enslaved, the racialized, the stateless.

Necropolitics, then, is the politics of death. It is the logic by which rulers decide who matters, who may live in dignity, and who may be consigned to “death worlds.” Where biopolitics describes the administration of life, necropolitics describes the sovereign decision over life and death itself.

Defining Necropolitics

Mbembe defines necropolitics as the use of social and political power to dictate how some people may live while others must die. It is not just about killing. It is about creating spaces where life is so precarious it becomes indistinguishable from death. It is about deciding which lives are worth protecting and which can be wasted, imprisoned, or exterminated without consequence.

Necropolitics does not always appear as outright killing. It can be slow and bureaucratic: denying healthcare, enforcing starvation through blockades, confining refugees in camps, policing borders so harshly that migrants drown at sea. It can be technological: drone strikes guided by algorithms, predictive policing that marks entire neighborhoods as “kill zones,” or facial recognition systems that erase certain populations from legitimacy.

Death Worlds

Central to Mbembe’s theory is the idea of death worlds. These are spaces where entire populations are subjected to conditions of life that are worse than death. Slavery was a death world: enslaved Africans were not only killed but reduced to living commodities, socially dead, denied humanity. Apartheid South Africa was a death world: Black populations confined to “homelands” and townships, denied movement, laboring in mines under lethal conditions. Palestine under occupation is a death world: checkpoints, bombings, sieges, and statelessness create conditions where life is permanently precarious.

Death worlds are not accidents; they are deliberate products of necropolitical power. They are zones where sovereignty shows itself nakedly: you may live, you may not.

Necropolitics and Slavery

Mbembe traces necropolitics back to slavery. In the transatlantic slave trade, African bodies were commodified, transported, and worked to death. Slaves lived in a condition of social death (a term borrowed from Orlando Patterson) — stripped of rights, kinship, and recognition as full humans. Slavery exemplifies necropolitics because it did not merely exploit labor; it turned entire populations into expendable, killable property. The slave’s life was always already a form of death.

Necropolitics and Colonial Occupation

Colonization extended this logic. Colonized territories were governed as spaces of exception, where laws were suspended and arbitrary violence normalized. Colonizers decided which populations could be exterminated (indigenous peoples), which could be exploited (peasants, laborers), and which could be assimilated (educated elites). The colony was not a space of rights but a laboratory of death.

Mbembe emphasizes that colonial sovereignty was necropolitical at its core. Unlike the metropole, which invested in citizens’ health, colonies were managed as zones of expendability. The colonial state combined biopolitics for some (the colonizers) with necropolitics for others (the colonized). This split persists today in global inequality, refugee regimes, and border controls.

Necropolitics and the State of Exception

Mbembe draws on Carl Schmitt’s notion that sovereignty is defined by the power to declare a state of exception — the suspension of law. Necropolitics thrives in these exceptions. In zones of war, occupation, or emergency, the state decides whose lives no longer count. Refugee camps, detention centers, and occupied territories function as permanent states of exception. Law is suspended; sovereignty dictates directly who may live and who must die.

Necropolitics in the Contemporary World

The power of necropolitics is visible today in multiple arenas:

• Gaza and Palestine — a paradigmatic death world where drones, blockades, and checkpoints regulate life and death.
• Guantánamo Bay — a site of permanent exception where detainees exist in legal limbo, subject to torture and indefinite confinement.
• Refugee camps — millions confined in conditions where survival is precarious and rights suspended.
• Racialized policing — in the U.S., Brazil, and beyond, where Black populations are disproportionately killed by police or left to die in underfunded neighborhoods.
• Pandemic triage — where access to vaccines, ventilators, or care becomes a necropolitical decision, with some populations left unprotected.

In each case, sovereignty is exercised not primarily through granting rights but through deciding life and death. This is why Mbembe insists that necropolitics is the hidden core of modern sovereignty.

Necropolitics and Desire

One of Mbembe’s most unsettling points is that necropolitics is not only external. Subjects may internalize and even eroticize it. Just as the postcolony is marked by complicity, necropolitics also generates strange intimacies. People may desire proximity to sovereign power, even when it is deadly. Soldiers, guards, or collaborators may take pleasure in exercising necropolitical authority over others. This intimacy with death is part of the horror of necropolitics — it is not always resisted; it is sometimes embraced.

Necropolitics vs. Human Rights Discourse

Mbembe’s concept is disruptive because it refuses the liberal assumption that sovereignty is gradually becoming more humane. Human rights discourse often imagines progress: fewer wars, more protections, greater recognition of universal humanity. Necropolitics shows the opposite: the modern world produces more zones of death, more populations deemed disposable, more technologies of killing. Human rights discourse may expose abuses, but it often coexists with — and sometimes legitimizes — necropolitical regimes by framing them as exceptions rather than structures.

Executional Implications of Necropolitics

For the Made2Master reader, necropolitics is not an abstract concept. It is a detection system. If you want to understand how power works in the 21st century, ask: who decides who may live and who must die? Where are the death worlds? Who is excluded from care, protection, or recognition?

• In healthcare: Which populations lack access to lifesaving treatment? Which communities are left to die of preventable diseases?
• In borders: Which migrants are turned back, detained, or allowed to drown? Which bodies are deemed expendable at sea?
• In algorithms: Which groups are erased from recognition, misclassified as threats, or denied access to credit, housing, or jobs?
• In policing: Which communities are policed as kill zones while others receive protection?

Necropolitics turns our attention to these questions. It trains us to see beyond surface-level governance to the life-and-death decisions hidden inside policies, technologies, and institutions.

Necropolitics as Execution System

Sovereignty, Mbembe argues, is ultimately the power of death. This is not a metaphor; it is an execution system. States, corporations, and platforms execute power by deciding who matters and who is disposable. Necropolitics is the operating system of empire, of apartheid, of drone warfare, of algorithmic governance. To resist domination in the digital age, we must recognize necropolitics in action.

The executional lesson is clear: if you can identify where necropolitics operates, you can strategize resistance. If you cannot, you risk becoming complicit in its death worlds.

Executional Lesson from Section 4

Necropolitics teaches us that sovereignty is the power to dictate death. The modern world is structured by death worlds — from slave ships to refugee camps, from apartheid to algorithmic exclusion. Resistance begins with detection: asking where life is abandoned, where death is normalized, where existence is precarious by design. This prepares us for Section 5, where we will examine how power over life and death plays out concretely across systems, and how Mbembe’s necropolitics helps us map sovereignty’s ultimate reach.

In Achille Mbembe’s framework, sovereignty is stripped to its most brutal essence: the right to decide who may live and who must die. If Section 4 introduced necropolitics as a concept, Section 5 shows its execution in practice. Life and death are not natural outcomes but political decisions. Every border checkpoint, every hospital triage system, every algorithmic denial of service is an enactment of sovereignty deciding life’s value.

Sovereignty as the Power of Death

Classical political theory (from Hobbes to Locke) defined sovereignty as the power to legislate, to protect, or to guarantee order. Mbembe cuts deeper. For him, the ultimate test of sovereignty is who controls death. A ruler’s authority is revealed not in constitutions or laws but in the power to expose populations to death, to create zones of abandonment, to normalize killing. Sovereignty is the capacity to make killing appear legitimate and abandonment appear natural.

This is why necropolitics is disruptive: it shows that sovereignty is not a neutral system of governance but a machine calibrated to distribute life unevenly. Some are nurtured, others neglected, and many rendered disposable. Sovereignty is not equally protective; it is selectively violent.

Historic Execution: Slavery and Apartheid

Mbembe identifies slavery as the archetypal exercise of necropolitical sovereignty. The slave’s life was suspended between existence and death. Legally alive but socially dead, enslaved Africans were forced into conditions of absolute disposability. Their lives were spent like currency, their deaths written off as collateral to economic gain. Sovereignty did not simply govern them; it consumed them.

Apartheid South Africa extended this necropolitical logic in modern form. The state divided populations into zones of privilege and death. White citizens received full biopolitical investment: healthcare, infrastructure, security. Black citizens were relegated to Bantustans, forced into mines, or policed into ghettos. Apartheid sovereignty operated not by protecting all but by deciding whose lives were to be nurtured and whose were to be wasted. This was necropolitics institutionalized.

Modern Zones of Death

Today, necropolitical power manifests in multiple geographies:

• Refugee camps — spaces of indefinite suspension where millions live without citizenship, exposed to disease, starvation, and hopelessness. The sovereign decision is clear: these lives may exist, but not fully, and never with dignity.
• Urban ghettos — neighborhoods policed as if they were war zones. In cities like Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg, and Chicago, residents live under constant threat of premature death — by police, gangs, or poverty. These are urban death worlds where sovereignty rules through abandonment and targeted violence.
• War zones — places like Gaza, Syria, or Yemen where entire populations live under permanent bombardment. Here sovereignty does not administer life; it declares entire regions killable.
• Prisons and detention centers — institutions that confine millions globally, often in conditions where life expectancy collapses. Sovereignty transforms incarceration into a slow death sentence.

These are not marginal spaces. They are central to modern sovereignty. Death worlds are the laboratories where sovereignty reveals its true nature: the decision over life and death itself.

Necropolitics and Health

Health is one of the clearest domains where sovereignty decides life and death. Access to medicine, clean water, and care is never neutral. It is distributed unevenly according to race, class, geography, and citizenship. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed this starkly. Vaccines flowed rapidly to wealthy nations while the Global South was left waiting. Decisions about who received ventilators in overwhelmed hospitals often mirrored racial and economic hierarchies. Public health policy became necropolitical triage.

Mbembe’s framework forces us to see that health systems are not only sites of care but also sites of abandonment. To deny care is to decide death. To ration medicine unequally is to assign value to lives. Sovereignty over life and death is inscribed into the very structure of healthcare.

Necropolitics and Borders

Borders are another frontier of necropolitics. Passports, visas, and biometric scans are tools for deciding who belongs to life and who is abandoned to death. Migrants drowning in the Mediterranean, asylum seekers trapped in detention centers, deportees sent to lethal environments — these are necropolitical outcomes. Borders are not neutral lines; they are machines of life and death.

Sovereignty operates here by dividing humanity into categories: citizens (lives to be protected) and non-citizens (lives expendable). The border does not merely separate spaces; it separates forms of life. It says: your death is of no consequence.

Necropolitics in Policing and Security

Policing is one of the most visible ways sovereignty enacts life-and-death control. In the United States, Black Americans are disproportionately killed by police, their deaths often treated as inevitable or justified. In Brazil’s favelas, police raids kill hundreds each year with impunity. In South Africa, police violence in townships continues the legacy of apartheid. These are not accidents. They are necropolitical decisions: certain populations are governed as killable.

Security regimes — counterterrorism, predictive policing, mass surveillance — extend this logic. They construct entire groups (Muslims, migrants, Black youth) as threats. Their lives are managed not for flourishing but for containment and elimination. Necropolitics defines them as disposable risks.

Algorithmic Necropolitics

A new frontier emerges in digital governance. Algorithms now participate in necropolitical decision-making: who gets a loan, who receives healthcare, who is flagged as a threat, who is excluded from visibility. Predictive policing software disproportionately targets Black neighborhoods. Health algorithms undervalue Black patients’ needs. Content moderation erases Palestinian voices while amplifying others.

These are not glitches; they are executions of sovereignty through code. Algorithms are the new commandement: opaque, arbitrary, and often deadly. They decide whose lives matter in data systems and whose are rendered invisible. This is necropolitics digitized.

The Economics of Death

Sovereignty over life and death is also economic. Global capitalism thrives on necropolitical zones. Mines in the Congo where workers die extracting cobalt for smartphones. Sweatshops where laborers collapse from exhaustion. Gig economies where workers are abandoned without healthcare. Finance calculates some lives as worth investment and others as disposable. The necropolitical economy is one where profit depends on expendable populations.

Resistance to Necropolitical Power

If sovereignty is the power over life and death, resistance must be the reclaiming of life. Social movements that demand healthcare access, that fight against police violence, that resist border deaths — all are struggles against necropolitical sovereignty. To say “Black Lives Matter” is to confront necropolitics head-on, declaring that lives deemed disposable are in fact invaluable. To fight for migrant rights is to resist borders as death machines. To demand digital transparency is to resist algorithmic necropolitics.

Mbembe reminds us that resistance is never pure. Just as postcolonial life is marked by complicity, so too struggles against necropolitics operate within contaminated systems. But resistance matters precisely because necropolitics thrives on invisibility. To name the zones of death is to disrupt their normalization.

Executional Mapping of Life/Death Power

For the Made2Master strategist, Section 5 provides the operational framework: map where sovereignty distributes life and death unequally. Look for the sites where survival is not guaranteed but politically decided:

• Hospitals during pandemics → Who receives care, who is abandoned?
• Borders and detention centers → Who is granted passage, who is left to die?
• Algorithms → Who is recognized, who is erased from legitimacy?
• Prisons → Who is confined to slow death, who remains free?
• Neighborhoods → Who receives protection, who lives under perpetual policing?

This mapping is not descriptive; it is executional. Once you detect necropolitics at work, you can design strategies of resistance, exposure, and sovereignty reclamation. Necropolitics thrives on being hidden as “normal.” The task is to reveal its operations.

Executional Lesson from Section 5

Sovereignty is not primarily about making laws or ensuring rights. It is about deciding life and death. This is the operating system of modern politics. If you want to understand power, ask: who lives, who dies, and who decides? If you want to resist, map the death worlds, expose their logic, and reclaim the value of life where sovereignty has declared it disposable.

Section 5 shows us the executional reality of necropolitics. Next, in Section 6, we will pivot to a new frontier: digital colonialism, where platforms, databases, and algorithms extend necropolitics into the digital sphere, creating new death worlds through data.

If colonialism carved the world through maps, guns, and plantations, digital colonialism carves it today through servers, cables, and algorithms. Achille Mbembe’s framework equips us to see this clearly. The same logics that structured the colony — extraction, surveillance, classification, disposability — now structure the digital order. Sovereignty has migrated into platforms, databases, and networks. The colony has become the cloud.

From Colonialism to Digital Colonialism

Classical colonialism was about control of land, bodies, and resources. Colonizers mapped territories, extracted labor, and governed populations through commandement. In the 21st century, corporations and states map, extract, and govern through data. Data is the new gold, the new oil, the new rubber. It is seized from populations, processed in global centers, and turned into profit and power.

This is why thinkers describe Silicon Valley as the new empire. Companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft do not govern territories, but they govern information. They hold sovereignty over visibility, legitimacy, and connection. They exercise commandement through code: the opaque algorithm that decides who appears, who disappears, who profits, and who is erased.

Data as the New Colonized Body

In colonialism, the body of the colonized was the site of extraction: forced labor, taxation, punishment. In digital colonialism, the body is still the target, but now through its data shadow. Every click, swipe, and movement becomes data, extracted without consent and commodified. Our biometric information, facial images, health records, and digital traces are harvested, stored, and traded.

Just as colonized peoples were reduced to laboring bodies, digital subjects are reduced to data profiles. And just as colonial states cared little for the lives of their subjects beyond extraction, platforms care little for digital subjects beyond monetization. What matters is not your existence but your data flow.

Infrastructure as Empire

Colonial empires built railways, ports, and telegraph lines to extract resources and control populations. Today’s digital empires build undersea cables, server farms, and satellites. These infrastructures are not neutral. They consolidate power in the hands of corporations and states that own them. Africa, for example, is increasingly wired by cables owned by Google (Equiano cable), Facebook (2Africa cable), and Chinese firms. Whoever owns the cables controls the flow of data, and by extension, the life chances of billions.

Digital colonialism is not abstract. It is material. The cloud is built on land, electricity, and exploited labor. Server farms consume massive energy, often placed in regions with little benefit to local populations. E-waste from discarded devices is dumped in African and Asian countries, exposing workers to toxic conditions. Just as colonial mines scarred landscapes, digital infrastructures scar ecosystems.

Surveillance as Commandement

Mbembe’s concept of commandement applies directly to digital surveillance. Colonial commandement meant arbitrary authority, unpredictable decrees, and constant monitoring. Digital commandement means opaque algorithms, unpredictable moderation, and constant tracking. Platforms watch every move, assign opaque scores, and discipline behavior through bans, shadowbans, and deplatforming. The digital subject, like the colonial subject, lives under constant surveillance and arbitrary judgment.

This surveillance is not only commercial but also political. States use digital tools to monitor citizens, suppress dissent, and control populations. From China’s social credit system to predictive policing in the United States, digital necropolitics operates by classifying populations into categories of trustworthiness, risk, and expendability.

Digital Borders

Colonialism drew borders with rulers and maps. Digital colonialism draws borders with firewalls, geofencing, and platform restrictions. Your access to information, services, or communities is determined by your IP address, your nationality, or your biometric verification. Borders are now digital checkpoints. They do not only control movement across land but also movement across networks. Sovereignty is exercised not only at airports but also at logins.

Consider how refugees and migrants experience this: denied access to digital banking, excluded from online identification systems, or subject to biometric tracking in camps. Digital borders decide who is visible, who is counted, and who is left in zones of invisibility. Just as colonial borders confined populations to reserves and homelands, digital borders confine populations to data ghettos.

Extraction of Attention

Colonialism extracted labor and raw materials. Digital colonialism extracts attention and behavioral surplus. Platforms design feeds, notifications, and ads to capture time and shape behavior. The subject becomes a mine of attention, continuously harvested for profit. This extraction has necropolitical consequences. Addictive design contributes to mental health crises, disinformation spreads deathly consequences (anti-vaccine lies, political violence), and populations are manipulated at scale. Sovereignty here is not only about death by violence but death by neglect, depression, or manipulated despair.

Racialized Algorithms

Colonialism organized humanity through race: who counted as human, who was inferior, who was killable. Digital colonialism reproduces this through algorithms. Facial recognition systems misidentify Black faces at higher rates, leading to wrongful arrests. Health algorithms under-prioritize Black patients. Hiring algorithms penalize names coded as non-white. Content moderation erases Palestinian voices while letting hate speech against minorities circulate.

These algorithmic biases are not accidents; they reflect the racialized training data and unequal priorities of their creators. Digital colonialism thus extends racial hierarchies into the infrastructure of everyday life. To exist as Black, brown, migrant, or disabled online is to risk being misclassified, excluded, or erased by code.

Planetary Necropolitics

Mbembe often writes of the “becoming black of the world” — the idea that disposability once reserved for Black bodies under slavery and colonialism now extends to broader populations under global capitalism. Digital colonialism demonstrates this planetary necropolitics. All users are mined for data, all are exposed to surveillance, all are potentially disposable. But the intensity is uneven. Migrants, refugees, and racialized groups bear the brunt, while elites enjoy digital privileges. Necropolitics becomes planetary, but it remains structured by race and class.

Executional Detection of Digital Colonialism

For the Made2Master strategist, the task is clear: detect where digital colonialism replicates necropolitics. Look for zones where platforms and states exercise commandement over life chances:

• Data extraction: Whose data is harvested without consent? Who profits from it?
• Digital borders: Who is excluded from identification systems, banking apps, or platforms?
• Algorithmic bias: Which groups are misclassified, erased, or over-targeted?
• Surveillance: Who is tracked more intensely — dissidents, migrants, racialized populations?
• Infrastructure: Who owns the cables, servers, and platforms? Who depends on them?

Digital colonialism hides itself as convenience and innovation. But when mapped through Mbembe’s lens, it is clear: it is the new empire, deciding life and death through data.

Executional Lesson from Section 6

Colonialism has not ended; it has migrated into code. Digital colonialism is the new necropolitics: extraction of data, surveillance of bodies, classification of lives, abandonment of populations. Sovereignty today is executed through platforms as much as through states. If you want to resist, you must map the infrastructures of digital power, expose the racialized logics of algorithms, and reclaim sovereignty over data.

This prepares us for Section 7: extending Mbembe’s necropolitics directly into the age of artificial intelligence. If digital colonialism is the empire of platforms, AI is the sovereign algorithm deciding who is allowed to exist, who is discarded, and who is invisible.

If necropolitics is the sovereign power to decide life and death, then artificial intelligence (AI) is its newest and most dangerous instrument. AI extends Achille Mbembe’s framework into the digital future: sovereignty is no longer just the decree of rulers or the policing of borders, but the invisible execution of algorithms. Who is recognized, who is denied, who is targeted, and who is erased — these are now algorithmic life-and-death decisions.

AI as Commandement

In colonial regimes, commandement meant arbitrary orders from rulers, unpredictable decrees, and constant surveillance. Today, algorithms replicate this logic. AI systems issue opaque commands: who qualifies for a loan, who is flagged as a security risk, whose resume is discarded, whose post is suppressed. Like colonial orders, algorithmic commandement is opaque, unchallengeable, and seemingly arbitrary. You cannot appeal to the algorithm; it speaks with sovereign authority.

This opacity makes AI the perfect necropolitical tool. The sovereign decision over life and death is hidden behind “technical” language — probability, risk scores, optimization. Yet the effects are brutally real: denial of healthcare, deportation, wrongful imprisonment, drone targeting. The algorithm’s commandement decides without appearing to decide.

AI in Warfare

One of the starkest applications of necropolitics in AI is autonomous warfare. Drones already operate with AI-assisted targeting, identifying “suspicious movement” and authorizing strikes. Predictive algorithms map “kill zones” where anyone present may be considered a legitimate target. Sovereignty over life and death is no longer the judgment of a commander but the output of a machine trained on biased data.

Mbembe’s concept of death worlds becomes chillingly concrete here. Entire regions — Gaza, Afghanistan, Yemen — are treated as algorithmic kill zones. AI extends the colonial logic of expendability: populations deemed risky are subjected to permanent aerial surveillance, targeted strikes, and slow annihilation. Necropolitics is executed through drone feeds and pattern recognition software.

AI in Policing

Predictive policing tools like COMPAS in the United States or ShotSpotter in urban neighborhoods extend necropolitics into everyday life. These systems disproportionately target Black and brown communities, labeling them as high-risk zones. The result is more patrols, more arrests, and more deaths. Sovereignty defines these populations as perpetually suspicious — their very presence coded as potential criminality.

In Mbembe’s terms, these communities become death worlds inside the metropolis. They live under constant surveillance, their lives reduced to risk scores. The algorithm doesn’t only predict crime; it produces it by saturating neighborhoods with policing and violence. Necropolitics becomes a feedback loop coded into software.

AI in Borders and Migration

Borders are increasingly governed by AI. Facial recognition systems verify identity at airports. Biometric databases track asylum seekers. Risk algorithms decide who is detained, who is deported, and who is left in limbo. Migrants crossing the Mediterranean are monitored by AI-powered surveillance drones, while EU border systems triage applications with opaque scoring.

Here, necropolitics is explicit: some are granted entry into life, others are abandoned to death at sea or indefinite detention. AI does not replace sovereignty; it automates it. The colonial logic of who belongs and who is disposable is written into code and executed at scale.

AI in Health and Care

Healthcare systems increasingly rely on AI to allocate resources. Insurance companies use algorithms to decide coverage. Hospitals use triage software to prioritize patients. During COVID-19, predictive models guided vaccine distribution and ventilator allocation. Studies show that many health algorithms undervalue Black patients’ needs, leading to less care and greater risk of death.

This is necropolitics hidden as efficiency. Sovereignty decides life and death not with guns but with spreadsheets and models. To be misclassified by an algorithm is to risk death by neglect. To be invisible to data systems is to not exist for care. In Mbembe’s terms, healthcare AI often creates zones of abandonment — populations denied the right to live because the algorithm decided their survival was not cost-effective.

Algorithmic Racism as Digital Necropolitics

Race was the organizing principle of colonial necropolitics. It determined who was killable, who was exploitable, and who was fully human. In the digital age, race is reproduced through data. Training sets are overwhelmingly white, Western, and male. As a result, facial recognition misidentifies Black faces, hiring algorithms penalize non-Western names, and content moderation erases marginalized voices.

This is algorithmic necropolitics: the reproduction of racial hierarchies in code. The algorithm becomes a racial sovereign, silently deciding who belongs in the world of data and who is rendered invisible or suspicious. Just as colonialism declared Blackness as disposable, AI often codes Blackness as error.

Necropolitics of Content Moderation

Platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter govern billions of lives through content moderation. Posts are flagged, removed, or down-ranked by algorithms. Entire communities can be silenced if their speech is coded as “unsafe” or “inappropriate.” Palestinian activists have documented how their content is systematically suppressed, while other forms of hate speech remain.

This is necropolitics in discourse: deciding which voices may live online and which are digitally killed. Visibility becomes a form of life; invisibility becomes a form of death. Sovereignty here is the algorithmic moderation system that defines what counts as legitimate existence in the digital sphere.

Necropolitics of Work and Automation

Automation also operates as necropolitics. Gig workers are managed by algorithmic platforms that decide shifts, pay, and terminations. To be “deactivated” by Uber or Deliveroo is to lose livelihood with no explanation. In warehouses, AI dictates pace and discipline, often to the point of exhaustion or collapse. Workers’ lives are measured only as metrics of efficiency.

Sovereignty here is exercised by platforms that govern labor not as human dignity but as expendable input. The necropolitical logic of slavery — bodies reduced to labor and discarded when unproductive — is reproduced by algorithmic work regimes.

Planetary AI Necropolitics

The effects of AI necropolitics are global but uneven. Wealthy nations deploy AI for efficiency and convenience, while poorer nations often serve as testing grounds or data mines. Surveillance technologies tested in Palestine, Xinjiang, or African border zones are later exported globally. The necropolitical frontier is planetary: entire regions are coded as laboratories of control, their populations subjected to experimental forms of algorithmic sovereignty.

Mbembe’s idea of the “becoming black of the world” applies here: populations once shielded from direct necropolitics are now exposed to it through digital governance. Everyone is potentially disposable under AI capitalism, but some are more disposable than others. The hierarchy of death persists.

Resistance to AI Necropolitics

Resistance to AI necropolitics requires both exposure and sovereignty. Exposure means identifying where algorithms decide life and death: health denial, deportation, predictive policing, content erasure. Sovereignty means reclaiming control over data, demanding algorithmic transparency, and building systems that center human dignity.

Grassroots groups are already mobilizing. Campaigns against facial recognition have won bans in some cities. Activists push for “algorithmic justice” to address bias. Data sovereignty movements demand that communities control their digital traces. These struggles are not merely technical; they are struggles against necropolitical sovereignty coded into AI.

Executional Detection of AI Necropolitics

For the Made2Master strategist, the executional task is clear: map where AI acts as necropolitical sovereign.

• Warfare: Who is flagged by drones? Who lives in algorithmic kill zones?
• Policing: Which communities are coded as high risk and over-policed?
• Borders: Who is excluded by biometric systems and deported by risk scores?
• Health: Who is denied care by biased algorithms?
• Labor: Who is exploited and discarded by platform automation?
• Visibility: Which voices are silenced by moderation systems?

Necropolitics is no longer only about physical killing. It is about digital killing: the denial of visibility, the erasure of identity, the abandonment of populations in data. AI is the new sovereign of life and death.

Executional Lesson from Section 7

Artificial intelligence is not neutral. It is the new necropolitical sovereign, deciding life chances invisibly. The sovereign decision Mbembe describes — who may live, who must die — is now executed by algorithms, hidden as optimization. To resist, you must map AI’s necropolitics: warfare, policing, borders, health, labor, and visibility. This prepares us for Section 8, where we will focus sharply on inequality in health, showing how necropolitics operates in hospitals, clinics, and bodies — and how resistance must reclaim the right to live.

If necropolitics is the power to decide who may live and who must die, nowhere is it more visible than in health. Illness, care, and survival are not distributed evenly. They are filtered through systems of race, class, geography, and policy. Achille Mbembe’s lens exposes what most public health discourse hides: healthcare is a battlefield of sovereignty. Every decision about access, funding, or eligibility is also a decision about life and death.

Colonial Legacies in Health

Colonial medicine was never only about healing. It was about control. Colonizers used medical interventions to protect settlers, not subjects; to keep laborers productive, not populations healthy. Vaccination campaigns, quarantine regimes, and hospitals were tools of surveillance as much as care. Indigenous knowledge systems were dismissed, while European medicine was imposed as a civilizing mission. Health was weaponized as part of commandement.

The legacy persists. Former colonies often inherited health systems designed not for universal access but for selective inclusion. Rural populations, indigenous groups, and racial minorities were systematically under-served. Mbembe reminds us: colonial sovereignty did not simply kill; it abandoned. In health, abandonment is slow necropolitics — leaving populations to die from preventable conditions.

Health Inequality as Necropolitics

Modern health systems reproduce these inequalities. Globally, the difference in life expectancy between the richest and poorest countries can exceed 30 years. Within nations, marginalized groups die younger, suffer more chronic disease, and receive less care. These are not biological inevitabilities; they are political decisions. Sovereignty invests resources in some populations while withdrawing them from others.

For Mbembe, this is necropolitics in its most intimate form. Death is not always sudden violence; it is also slow neglect. It is the child dying of diarrhea because healthcare was privatized. It is the woman denied reproductive care because her community lacks clinics. It is the elderly patient rationed off life support because hospital budgets prioritize efficiency over dignity. Each is a sovereign decision disguised as policy.

Pandemics as Necropolitical Theatre

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the necropolitical core of health governance. Wealthy nations hoarded vaccines while poorer nations waited. Essential workers were praised as heroes but exposed without adequate protection. Disabled and elderly populations were triaged in overwhelmed hospitals. The question of who lived and who died was not random; it followed existing hierarchies of race, class, and geography.

Mbembe’s framework helps us see the pandemic not as a natural disaster but as a political theatre of life and death. Sovereignty decided which lives were worth saving, which were expendable, and which were abandoned. Necropolitics was not hidden; it was on full display in the unequal distribution of survival.

Digital Health and Algorithmic Abandonment

Digital health technologies add a new layer of necropolitics. Algorithms now decide insurance coverage, triage patients, and allocate resources. Studies reveal racial bias in health algorithms: Black patients were systematically given lower risk scores, leading to less access to care. Telemedicine often excludes rural or poor populations without internet access. Biometric health apps collect data without consent, turning patients into sources of profit rather than subjects of care.

This is what Mbembe would call a death world of health: a system where technology promises efficiency but delivers exclusion. Necropolitics is coded into the infrastructure of digital health, deciding whose lives are visible to the system and whose are erased.

Global Health Apartheid

The global distribution of medicine mirrors colonial hierarchies. Clinical trials are often conducted in the Global South, but lifesaving drugs remain priced for the Global North. Patents protect profits rather than lives. When Ebola struck West Africa, treatments existed in labs but were withheld until Western lives were threatened. This is global necropolitics: Black and brown lives treated as test subjects, not as lives worth saving.

Mbembe’s concept of the “becoming black of the world” resonates here. The Global South remains coded as disposable in health governance. Yet, as climate change, pandemics, and austerity spread, even populations in wealthy nations are exposed to abandonment. Necropolitics globalizes, but it is rooted in the same colonial hierarchies.

Health and the Politics of Disability

Necropolitics also operates through the marginalization of disabled lives. Healthcare systems often devalue disabled existence, treating it as a lower priority for survival. During COVID-19, many hospitals considered disability as a criterion for denying intensive care. Insurance systems penalize people with chronic illness. Assistive technologies are priced beyond reach for those who need them most.

In Mbembe’s terms, disabled lives are often positioned at the edge of humanity — tolerated but not fully invested in, cared for selectively, and abandoned when resources are scarce. This is sovereignty over life and death in one of its starkest forms.

Climate Change and Health Necropolitics

Climate change amplifies health necropolitics. Rising temperatures, pollution, and extreme weather disproportionately harm poor and marginalized populations. Heatwaves kill those without air conditioning. Floods devastate communities without infrastructure. Pollution shortens the lives of those living near factories, mines, or highways. Sovereignty decides which communities receive adaptation funding and which are left to drown or suffocate.

Here, necropolitics fuses with ecology. The Anthropocene is also a necropolitical age, where life and death are managed through planetary systems of extraction and abandonment. Mbembe’s framework makes clear: climate change is not only environmental but also political — it decides survival.

Resistance in Health

Resistance to health necropolitics takes many forms:

• Global health equity movements demanding vaccine access, generic medicines, and abolition of exploitative patents.
• Grassroots care networks building solidarity-based health systems outside state neglect.
• Disability justice movements insisting that disabled lives are not disposable but central to human dignity.
• Data sovereignty campaigns fighting for control over health data and resisting its commodification.

These are not merely humanitarian efforts. They are struggles against necropolitical sovereignty in health. They reclaim the right to live where sovereignty has decided abandonment.

Executional Mapping of Health Inequality

For the Made2Master strategist, Section 8 provides a diagnostic tool: map where health necropolitics operates. Ask:

• Which populations are consistently under-served in health systems?
• Whose survival depends on geography, wealth, or race?
• Where do algorithms decide care access without accountability?
• Which diseases receive funding, and which are ignored?
• Who profits from medicine, and who is excluded from it?

Mapping these questions reveals the necropolitical structure of health. It shows that inequality is not accidental; it is designed. Sovereignty decides whose health matters and whose suffering is normalized.

Executional Lesson from Section 8

Health is not neutral. It is necropolitical. Every clinic, every algorithm, every patent is a decision about life and death. Mbembe’s lens teaches us to detect these decisions and resist them. The fight for health equity is not charity — it is a fight against necropolitical sovereignty itself. To reclaim the right to live is to confront the deepest structure of power.

Section 8 prepares us for Section 9: Modern Sovereignty, where we widen the lens. Sovereignty no longer belongs only to states but to corporations, platforms, and infrastructures. Necropolitics has become the hidden operating system of the global order. The next step is to map sovereignty itself in the digital and planetary age.

In classical political theory, sovereignty was the supreme authority of the state. Hobbes defined it as the power to guarantee security. Schmitt defined it as the power to decide the exception. Foucault mapped it into biopolitics. Achille Mbembe pushes further: sovereignty today is not confined to kings or presidents, but distributed across states, corporations, platforms, and infrastructures. Sovereignty is now a mesh of actors deciding, directly or indirectly, who may live and who must die. This is the landscape of modern necropolitics.

Sovereignty Beyond the State

Mbembe teaches us that sovereignty is not monopolized by governments. It has leaked into corporations that control resources, platforms that control visibility, and infrastructures that control life chances. Amazon’s supply chains, Google’s search rankings, Meta’s content moderation, Pfizer’s patents — these are not just corporate functions. They are sovereign decisions over existence. They determine who eats, who speaks, who heals, and who is abandoned.

This shift does not eliminate the state. Instead, states collaborate with corporate sovereignty. Governments contract private firms to manage prisons, borders, and surveillance. Military drones are built by tech companies. Health systems depend on pharmaceutical monopolies. Modern sovereignty is a hybrid of state and corporate necropolitics.

States of Exception as Normality

Carl Schmitt argued that sovereignty is defined by the ability to declare a state of exception — suspending laws in the name of necessity. Mbembe shows that in modern governance, exceptions have become permanent. Refugee camps, occupied territories, urban ghettos, and digital platforms operate under perpetual exceptions. Normal rights are suspended; life is managed directly by sovereign decree or algorithmic code.

The War on Terror made this explicit. Guantánamo Bay is a permanent exception: detainees exist outside normal law, held indefinitely. But exceptions now stretch everywhere: pandemic lockdowns, algorithmic moderation, predictive policing. Sovereignty no longer announces exceptions; it routinizes them. The exception is the rule.

Corporate Necropolitics

Consider pharmaceutical patents. When corporations withhold lifesaving medicine in order to maximize profit, they exercise sovereignty over life and death. When social media companies suppress certain political movements while amplifying others, they determine the survival of discourses and communities. When financial institutions impose austerity on indebted nations, they cut off healthcare, education, and survival for millions.

This is corporate necropolitics: sovereignty without elections, exercised through contracts, patents, and code. These corporations are not accountable to the populations whose lives they govern. Yet their decisions are sovereign in Mbembe’s sense — they decide who may live and who is left to die.

Platform Sovereignty

Platforms like Google, Facebook, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter) govern digital life. They decide who is visible, who is silenced, who earns, and who is banned. Their algorithms act as sovereign judges, assigning legitimacy or erasure. In Mbembe’s framework, visibility itself is life. To be erased digitally is a form of necropolitical death.

Platform sovereignty is particularly insidious because it hides itself as “neutral technology.” In reality, it is sovereignty executed through algorithmic commandement. Entire communities — activists, journalists, marginalized groups — can be silenced with one moderation sweep. Modern sovereignty does not only rule over bodies; it rules over feeds, timelines, and searches.

Infrastructural Sovereignty

Sovereignty is also embedded in infrastructure. Who owns the undersea cables that carry data? Who owns the satellites that control GPS? Who controls ports, highways, and energy grids? These questions are about sovereignty because infrastructure is life support. To cut it off is to condemn populations to death worlds.

Infrastructural sovereignty is often hidden until crisis hits. A blackout reveals the power grid’s necropolitical structure. A pandemic reveals the medical supply chain’s inequality. A war reveals dependence on foreign satellites or pipelines. Mbembe’s framework teaches us: infrastructure is not neutral; it is a weapon of sovereignty over life and death.

Sovereignty and Climate

Climate change exposes sovereignty at planetary scale. Who receives adaptation funding? Which populations are relocated after floods? Who gets protection from heatwaves, and who is left exposed? These are sovereign decisions, even when cloaked in technical language. Climate politics is necropolitics: deciding whose survival is guaranteed and whose extinction is tolerated.

Mbembe’s work pushes us to see climate not only as environment but as power. The Anthropocene is a necropolitical age, where sovereignty decides survival at planetary scale. Nations in the Global North adapt with infrastructure; nations in the Global South are abandoned to rising seas. Sovereignty divides humanity into those with a future and those consigned to ecological death.

Surveillance and the Digital Panopticon

Modern sovereignty is inseparable from surveillance. Biometric passports, facial recognition, predictive analytics — these are the tools of digital commandement. They do not merely monitor; they sort humanity into categories of legitimacy and suspicion. Surveillance is not neutral data collection; it is necropolitical triage.

To be flagged as “high risk” by an algorithm is to be exposed to death — by police violence, by deportation, by denial of care. Surveillance is modern sovereignty’s most efficient weapon. It executes death decisions invisibly, through scores and metrics.

Mbembe and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy

Liberal democracy imagines sovereignty as the people’s power exercised through rights and representation. Mbembe unmasks this illusion. Rights are distributed unevenly. Representation is filtered by algorithms and corporate ownership. Even in democracies, sovereignty operates necropolitically: some citizens are protected, others abandoned. Mass incarceration, racialized policing, and refugee exclusion are not failures of democracy; they are its necropolitical foundation.

The crisis of liberal democracy is therefore not only populism or polarization. It is necropolitics: the exposure of populations to death despite formal rights. Mbembe shows that sovereignty in democracies is as necropolitical as in dictatorships, only more hidden.

Resistance and Counter-Sovereignty

If modern sovereignty is distributed across states, corporations, and infrastructures, resistance must also be distributed. Activists fight corporate patents, demanding generic medicines. Campaigns resist algorithmic bias, demanding transparency. Communities build alternative infrastructures — mesh networks, community clinics, renewable energy cooperatives. These are not marginal efforts; they are counter-sovereignty.

Mbembe’s framework shows that resistance is not only about overthrowing governments. It is about reclaiming sovereignty wherever it has migrated: in data, in code, in infrastructure, in climate policy. Resistance means building new sovereignties that value life rather than deciding death.

Executional Mapping of Modern Sovereignty

For the Made2Master strategist, Section 9 provides the clearest operational tool: map sovereignty wherever it hides. Ask:

• Which corporations decide survival through patents, loans, or algorithms?
• Which infrastructures decide life chances through access or exclusion?
• Which states enforce permanent exceptions against populations?
• Which platforms decide visibility, legitimacy, and silence?
• Which ecological decisions allocate futures unequally?

Sovereignty is not a crown or a flag. It is the hidden operating system of modern life. To resist necropolitics, you must detect sovereignty in its distributed forms — and design counter-sovereignties that protect life rather than decide death.

Executional Lesson from Section 9

Sovereignty today is hybrid, distributed, and necropolitical. It is not only in parliaments but also in patents, platforms, and pipelines. Mbembe’s framework reveals sovereignty as the global operating system of life and death. The executional task is detection and counter-design: map the nodes of sovereignty and build alternatives that safeguard life.

This prepares us for Section 10: the Mbembe Digital Sovereignty Framework — a practical execution manual for resisting necropolitics in the digital age, reclaiming life where sovereignty has declared disposability.

Execution Framework — Mbembe Digital Sovereignty Framework

Achille Mbembe’s philosophy does not end in critique. The power of his concept of necropolitics is that it can be weaponized for resistance. If sovereignty is the capacity to decide life and death, then liberation requires seizing back that decision — refusing to let platforms, corporations, and states determine who is disposable. This section delivers the Mbembe Digital Sovereignty Framework: a practical, executional system for resisting necropolitics in the digital age.

Principle 1 — Detection

Necropolitics thrives on invisibility. It hides itself as policy, efficiency, optimization, or “technical necessity.” The first principle is detection: expose where sovereignty decides life and death.

• Health: Track which populations are consistently denied access to lifesaving care.
• Borders: Map where biometric systems exclude migrants and refugees.
• AI: Audit algorithms for bias in recognition, hiring, or policing.
• Climate: Identify which communities are abandoned to floods, heat, or pollution.
• Platforms: Expose moderation patterns that erase entire voices or movements.

Detection is surveillance of sovereignty. You cannot fight what you cannot see.

Principle 2 — Exposure

Necropolitics depends on normalization. The second principle is exposure: render visible what has been naturalized. Turn hidden death worlds into public evidence.

• Use data journalism to expose disparities in health, policing, or platform visibility.
• Create maps of digital borders showing exclusion zones and algorithmic ghettos.
• Document testimonies from populations living in necropolitical zones (refugee camps, ghettos, prisons).
• Leverage art and media to make necropolitics impossible to ignore.

Exposure transforms necropolitics from background noise into political scandal.

Principle 3 — Counter-Sovereignty

Resistance is not only critique; it is the creation of alternative sovereignties. The third principle is counter-sovereignty: building infrastructures that safeguard life rather than decide death.

• Community health networks that provide care where states and corporations abandon.
• Data cooperatives that let people control how their information is used.
• Decentralized platforms where visibility is not dictated by opaque algorithms.
• Renewable micro-grids to resist infrastructural abandonment during climate crises.
• Legal interventions to abolish patents that block access to essential medicines.

Counter-sovereignty means designing systems where life is prioritized, not triaged.

Principle 4 — Hybrid Resistance

Necropolitics is hybrid — state, corporate, algorithmic. Resistance must also be hybrid. The fourth principle is hybrid resistance: connect struggles across domains.

• Link health equity movements with digital rights campaigns to resist algorithmic health triage.
• Unite climate justice with migration rights — because ecological collapse produces refugees.
• Bridge labor movements with AI accountability — workers’ exploitation is coded into platforms.
• Build global coalitions — because necropolitics is planetary, resistance must be planetary too.

Hybrid sovereignty requires hybrid struggle. No single movement can resist necropolitics alone.

Principle 5 — Algorithmic Sovereignty

In the digital age, sovereignty resides in code. The fifth principle is algorithmic sovereignty: reclaim control over AI and digital infrastructures.

• Demand algorithmic transparency — laws that force disclosure of how decisions are made.
• Insist on explainable AI — systems accountable to the people they affect.
• Build open-source alternatives that communities can audit and control.
• Refuse digital colonialism — resist monopolies of Silicon Valley and Chinese state platforms over global South data.

Algorithmic sovereignty is the frontier of resistance. Without it, necropolitics will remain hidden inside code.

Principle 6 — Right to Care

Necropolitics thrives by abandoning populations. The sixth principle is the right to care: assert that healthcare, food, housing, and dignity are non-negotiable. These are not privileges but conditions of existence.

To fight for the right to care is to fight necropolitics directly. It is to insist that no life is disposable, no body is abandonable. This principle transforms health struggles, disability justice, and mutual aid into direct forms of counter-sovereignty.

Principle 7 — Planetary Ethics

Mbembe insists that necropolitics is planetary: the becoming-black of the world, the extension of disposability to all. The seventh principle is planetary ethics: design politics not for the privileged few but for humanity as a whole, embedded in ecology.

• Recognize climate justice as inseparable from survival.
• Treat ecological destruction as necropolitics against future generations.
• Build planetary solidarity across race, class, and geography.

Planetary ethics shifts sovereignty away from death toward shared survival.

Executional Practices

To operationalize the Mbembe Digital Sovereignty Framework, here are concrete practices:

• Audit — Regularly investigate where necropolitics operates in your context: policing, health, platforms, or climate.
• Expose — Publish, document, and visualize inequalities to strip them of normalization.
• Organize — Build coalitions across health, digital rights, labor, and climate struggles.
• Innovate — Create parallel infrastructures that center life: community clinics, open-source platforms, renewable networks.
• Enforce — Push for laws that recognize algorithmic accountability, abolish necropolitical patents, and guarantee care.

AI Processing Reality

In Made2Master’s executional language: 🧠 AI Processing Reality… The framework is not a manifesto. It is a system. It processes reality by identifying necropolitical codes and generating strategies of resistance. Each principle is a module. Each practice is a prompt for execution. Together, they form a living architecture for reclaiming sovereignty.

Why This Matters

Mbembe’s philosophy is not only African or postcolonial. It is planetary. Necropolitics structures refugee camps and Silicon Valley feeds alike. It governs through bullets and algorithms, patents and borders, climate collapse and platform erasure. To ignore it is to live in denial. To detect it is to gain clarity. To resist it is to reclaim humanity.

Executional Lesson from Section 10

The Mbembe Digital Sovereignty Framework teaches us: sovereignty is no longer only in the hands of states. It lives in platforms, infrastructures, and codes. It decides life and death invisibly, under the name of optimization. Resistance requires a new sovereignty: one rooted in care, transparency, and planetary ethics. Execution means building systems where life, not death, is the principle of order.

Closing

Achille Mbembe began by mapping colonial violence. He showed us the absurdity of the postcolony. He revealed the hidden logic of necropolitics. Today, his framework equips us to face AI, digital colonialism, and planetary crisis. His philosophy is not just critique. It is a survival manual. The task is clear: detect necropolitics, expose its logics, build counter-sovereignties, and reclaim the right to live in dignity.

This is the Mbembe Digital Sovereignty Framework. It is not only theory. It is execution.