Understanding Necropolitics: When the State Decides Who Lives and Who Dies
UPSC Relevance
Prelims: Unlikely to be asked directly, but concepts from thinkers like Foucault can appear. Primarily a Mains topic.
Mains:
GS Paper 1: Social empowerment, Communalism, regionalism & secularism; Poverty and developmental issues. (The concept can be used to analyze the plight of marginalized communities).
GS Paper 2: Welfare schemes for vulnerable sections of the population and issues arising out of their design and implementation.
GS Paper 4 (Ethics): Human Values; Ethical concerns and dilemmas in government and private institutions; Conscience; Accountability.
Essay: Perfect for critical and philosophical essays on state, power, justice, and the value of human life.
Key Highlights from the News
Necropolitics is the use of political power to decide whose life is valuable and who can be pushed towards death.
Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe introduced this concept.
It is an extension of Michel Foucault's concept of Biopolitics. While Biopolitics controls life, Necropolitics controls death.
This is a situation where the state, through neglect, violence, and policies, "makes them die" instead of merely "allowing people to die."
Examples include refugees, the poor, and marginalized communities being pushed to death through structural abandonment and violence.
The "state of exception," which temporarily suspends the rule of law, becomes a permanent condition for some segments of the population.
Mbembe described "the living dead" as those who are biologically alive but politically and socially equivalent to the dead.
The article points to the suffering of migrant workers during the COVID-19 lockdown in India and the normalization of violence in Kashmir as examples of Necropolitics.
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