"Commentators from all sides of politics have expressed concerns about the effect of inequality on the fabric of society in the United States, where the share of wealth held by the richest 1 percent rose from a quarter to two-fifths between 1990 and 2012. But if you think that’s bad, look what’s happened to the world as a whole: in just the decade after 2000, the richest 1 percent of the world’s population increased its wealth from one-third of everything to a half. The top three and a half dozen people now own as much as the bottom three and a half billion. How is democracy possible with that kind of gulf in wealth and power between citizens?"
By Malik Mukhtar (Full-Length Version with Mbembe Quotations) There are historical moments when the ordinary vocabulary of violence collapses . When “ conflict ,” “ occupation ,” and “ security ” no longer carry the weight required to explain what is unfolding before our eyes. Gaza is one such moment — a rupture in the moral architecture of the present. It is not simply a battlefield. It is an experiment in state-administered dying , in what Achille Mbembe named necropolitic s — the transformation of political power into the authority to dictate who may live and who must die. In Necropolitics (2003), Mbembe writes: “ The ultimate expression of sovereignty resides… in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.” — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics For Gaza, this is not theory. This is the daily grammar of existence. My book, Calculus of Survival: Necropolitics, Siege, and the Deionization of Life in Gaza , is situated squarely within this reality —...
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