“The ultimate expression of sovereignty resides in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.”
— Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics”
There are philosophies that dissect history, and there are philosophies that bleed through it. Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics belongs to the latter — it is not an academic exercise, but a diagnosis of the world’s moral decay.
In his words, modern sovereignty is no longer about governing life — it is about managing death. It decides who is allowed to breathe, who must suffocate, and who will exist in the space between.
Nowhere is this calculus of death more visible, more technologically refined, and more ethically bankrupt than in Palestine.
The siege of Gaza has transformed necropolitics from theory into geography — a place where the architecture of control and the arithmetic of survival intersect.
The Right to Kill, the Duty to Let Die
In Necropolitics, Mbembe extends Foucault’s biopower — the power to “make live and let die” — into what he calls necropower: the authority to decide who must live under the shadow of death.
Gaza is its most vivid manifestation — a region kept alive through starvation, and starved through forced survival.
“To occupy is to create zones of death; to live under occupation is to live in a permanent condition of injury.”
— Achille Mbembe
This very paradox — survival as punishment, existence as control — forms the moral and analytical core of my upcoming book,
The Calculus of Survival: Necropolitics, Siege, and the Deionization of Life in Gaza.
The book builds on Mbembe’s framework to expose how Gaza has become a death-world: a space where life itself is reduced to numbers — calories, liters, megawatts — and where survival is engineered as a form of submission.
Gaza as the Laboratory of Death
Mbembe once called the occupied territories “laboratories of necropolitics.”
They are not merely war zones — they are test sites for a global experiment in controlling populations without formally killing them.
Drones, biometric databases, walls, and siege economics function as tools of necropower — ways of maintaining sovereignty not through law, but through the slow erasure of life.
“The occupied territories are laboratories where the control of bodies and the destruction of life are tested.”
— Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (2019)
In Gaza, this manifests as a bureaucracy of death. The siege operates like a spreadsheet of suffering — regulating calories, fuel, and medicine. Israel’s own documents refer to the “red lines” of minimum caloric intake for Palestinians — the bare threshold between malnutrition and revolt.
It is the scientific administration of despair, the perfect example of what Mbembe calls the politics of death.
The Living Dead: Survival as Resistance
Mbembe writes of the living dead — people kept alive only to die slowly.
In Gaza, the living dead are not metaphors; they are mothers giving birth in the dark, surgeons operating without anesthesia, children playing beside rubble still warm with memory.
Every breath is political. Every survival is defiance.
“Gaza epitomizes the becoming of the world as a death-world — where people are kept alive in order to be killed slowly.”
— Mbembe, European Graduate School Lecture (2016)
In The Calculus of Survival, I trace how this necropolitical condition extends beyond the battlefield — into the moral infrastructure of the international system.
The book explores how aid, diplomacy, and law — the very instruments meant to protect life — are repurposed to maintain the architecture of siege.
It asks the question Mbembe’s philosophy demands: When survival itself becomes submission, what remains of freedom?
Colonial Shadows and Modern Machines
Mbembe insists that necropolitics is the afterlife of colonialism.
It is sustained by racial hierarchies that determine who counts as human, who can be mourned, and who can be erased without consequence.
In Palestine, that logic has been digitized: drones replace bayonets, algorithms replace overseers, but the principle remains the same — some lives are disposable.
“In the logic of necropower, racism is the condition for acceptable killing.”
— Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics
The wall, the checkpoint, the surveillance tower — all are modern symbols of an ancient structure: the right to divide the world into the protected and the perishable.
My book’s subtitle, “The Deionization of Life,” borrows from this reality — the stripping of vitality, dignity, and humanity until only endurance remains.
It is the slow chemical bleaching of the human spirit under occupation.
The World as Gaza
Mbembe warns that Palestine is not an exception — it is a mirror.
From Gaza to Guantánamo, from Rohingya camps to Mediterranean borders, the world is being restructured through zones of managed death.
The technologies and justifications used in Palestine have become templates for global governance:
the refugee camp as permanent political form, the drone as tool of omnipresent sovereignty, the “humanitarian corridor” as euphemism for control.
“Palestine is not an exception; it is the paradigm through which the modern politics of death reveals itself.”
— Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics
This is the central argument of The Calculus of Survival:
that Gaza is not merely a place under siege — it is a model of the world that is coming.
A world where borders become graves, where empathy is criminalized, and where silence becomes complicity in the arithmetic of extermination.
Against the Politics of Death
To confront necropolitics is to confront ourselves — our neutrality, our fatigue, our rationalizations.
When the global order debates the “minimum humanitarian requirements” of Gaza, it participates in the bureaucratization of cruelty.
It counts lives the way a banker counts debts — with precision and detachment.
“The power to kill, to lثثثet live, or to expose to death has become the ultimate mark of sovereignty.”
— Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics
But resistance is not absent. It pulses beneath the ruins — in the refusal to vanish, in the endurance of breath, in the act of writing.
If necropolitics is the science of slow death, then writing, truth, and solidarity are its antidotes — small acts of resurrection against a world that normalizes dying.
Epilogue: Writing in the Ruins
Mbembe’s work does not explain Gaza from afar — it illuminates the world through Gaza.
The Calculus of Survival: Necropolitics, Siege, and the Deionization of Life in Gaza continues that illumination, mapping how power kills not only bodies but also the moral conscience of those who watch.
To write about Gaza, today, is to write about the future —
a future in which the right to live is no longer guaranteed, but negotiated through the machinery of power.
“Necropolitics is not merely the politics of killing. It is the politics of making death productive — for power, for profit, for control.”
— Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (2019)
Ainnbeen | Writing in the Ruins
Because to write about Gaza is to write about the world that made it possible.
📘 From the forthcoming book The Calculus of Survival: Necropolitics, Siege, and the Deionization of Life in Gaza by Malik Mukhtar.
Comments