Mbembe analyzes colonial occupation, racial capitalism, and contemporary sovereignty through concepts that foreground how political power exposes populations to injury and death.
Intellectual setting
Writing after the Cold War and amid debates about postcolonial African states, Mbembe extended conversations with Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and African political thought into analyses of occupation, borders, and militarized rule.
Key ideas
Necropolitics
Sovereignty is exercised not only by administering life but by deciding whose lives are rendered disposable, exposed to death, or made to inhabit death-worlds.
Politics of enmity
Colonial histories and securitized democracies can organize political membership through hostility, exclusion, and the manufacture of enemies.
Legacy
Necropolitics has become a widely used and contested term in political theory, critical race studies, geography, and analyses of war, policing, public health, and migration.