Achille Mbembe is a Cameroonian philosopher who took Foucault’s ideas about power and asked: what happens when power is not just about controlling life, but about deciding who gets to die?
Foucault wrote about biopower, the management of populations, the power to “make live.” Mbembe pointed out that this analysis is useless for the colonies. Colonial power is not about making live. It is about letting die, or actively fucking killing, with zero consequences.(we see this any other day)
He calls this necropolitics: the power to decide who lives and who dies. In the colonial world, certain lives are not worth protecting. They are expendable. Killable without consequences. You see this in every war in Africa, every drone strike in the Middle East, every border where people drown because the richer country decided their lives were not worth the trouble.
Mbembe also wrote On the Postcolony (2001), which tries to describe what postcolonial African states actually look like without using the Western framework of “failed states” and “corruption.” He argues postcolonial states are not failed versions of European states. They are something completely different, born from the specific violence of colonial occupation and the specific struggles of decolonization.
Starter book: Necropolitics (2019, English translation). Short, maybe 80 pages of actual text.
