°Necropolitics
In “Necropolitics”, Achille Mbembe discusses the spatial demarcations of the state of exception as the geopolitical demarcation of zones, and the more recent mobilisation of the war machine. I’ll excerpt a hefty portion of the essay below, which is worth reading if you have the inclination (or in full if you’ve online access to Public Culture 15(1): 11–40).
Mbembe concludes the essay by arguing that the concept of biopolitics might be better replaced with necropolitics, and he discusses suicide bombings at some length, in a pretty interesting way. But I am not sure I would follow him there with respect to the question of bios versus necros. They don’t seem to me distinguishable. The nexus between life and death politics is surely complicated not only by ‘the right to life’ (and the politics that attend it), but also by the reorganisation of so-called health and welfare policies, pharmacapitalism and its geopolitics, the proprietisation of genes, and so on.
But, maybe more than that, I would be inclined to think the following (the transition between the territorial state to a mobile war machine, as Mbembe puts it) through a more detailed discussion of the why and how of so-called ‘failed states’ in relation to their inability to give effect to the control over populations (and not simply resources). He talks about the ‘erosion’ of their ability to control, but there’s no discussion of what it was that eroded this. In that sense, it’s left open to characterise this erosion in terms not of people’s struggles but of processes that occur ‘above their heads’ as it were. Thereby reducing them to objects of the war machines’ movements, but not capable of movement themselves.
Anyway, the long excerpt, with an intervening remark:
[…] in modern philosophical thought and European political practice and imaginary, the colony represents the site where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of a power outside the law (ab legibus solutus) and where “peace” is more likely to take on the face of a “war without end.”
Indeed, such a view corresponds to Carl Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty at the beginning of the twentieth century, namely, the power to decide on the state of exception. To properly assess the efficacy of the colony as a formation of terror, we need to take a detour into the European imaginary itself as it relates to the critical issue of the domestication of war and the creation of a European juridical order (Jus publicum Europaeum). At the basis of this order were two key principles. The first postulated the juridical equality of all states. This equality was notably applied to the right to wage war (the taking of life). The right to war meant two things. On the one hand, to kill or to conclude peace was recognized as one of the preeminent functions of any state. It went hand in hand with the recognition of the fact that no state could make claims to rule outside of its borders. But conversely, the state could recognize no authority above it within its own borders. On the other hand, the state, for its part, undertook to “civilize” the ways of killing and to attribute rational objectives to the very act of killing.
The second principle related to the territorialization of the sovereign state, that is, to the determination of its frontiers within the context of a newly imposed global order. In this context, the Jus publicum rapidly assumed the form of a distinction between, on the one hand, those parts of the globe available for colonial appropriation and, on the other, Europe itself (where the Jus publicum was to hold sway). This distinction, as we will see, is crucial in terms of assessing the efficacy of the colony as a terror formation. Under Jus publicum, a legitimate war is, to a large extent, a war conducted by one state against another or, more precisely, a war between “civilized” states. The centrality of the state in the calculus of war derives from the fact that the state is the model of political unity, a principle of rational organization, the embodiment of the idea of the universal, and a moral sign.
In the same context, colonies are similar to the frontiers. They are inhabited by “savages.” The colonies are not organized in a state form and have not created a human world. Their armies do not form a distinct entity, and their wars are not wars between regular armies. They do not imply the mobilization of sovereign subjects (citizens) who respect each other as enemies. They do not establish a distinction between combatants and noncombatants, or again between an “enemy” and a “criminal.” It is thus impossible to conclude peace with them. In sum, colonies are zones in which war and disorder, internal and external figures of the political, stand side by side or alternate with each other.
As such, the colonies are the location par excellence where the controls and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended—the zone where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of “civilization.” […]
He goes on to talk about the more recent mobility of the war machine, the initial reference point being Africa from the 1970s (but which is not at all difficult to discern in the context of the more recent wars in the Middle East no less than in the Australian governments’ just-in-time export of police and legal machinery to the Pacific. Maybe also the now-fading ‘Pacific Solution’ of offshore internment camps, as the very mobility of the enclosures itself, which might well complicate Mbembe’s characterisation of a shift from a territorialising state to that of a deterritorialised war machine. Seems to me that one is also the other, precisely at the point one introduces an analysis of labour-power.
Coercion itself has become a market commodity. Military manpower is bought and sold on a market in which the identity of suppliers and purchasers means almost nothing. Urban militias, private armies, armies of regional lords, private security firms, and state armies all claim the right to exercise violence or to kill. Neighboring states or rebel movements lease armies to poor states. Nonstate deployers of violence supply two critical coercive resources: labor and minerals. Increasingly, the vast majority of armies are composed of citizen soldiers, child soldiers, mercenaries, and privateers.
Alongside armies have therefore emerged what, following Deleuze and Guattari, we could refer to as war machines. War machines are made up of segments of armed men that split up or merge with one another depending on the tasks to be carried out and the circumstances. Polymorphous and diffuse organizations, war machines are characterized by their capacity for metamorphosis. Their relation to space is mobile. Sometimes, they enjoy complex links with state forms (from autonomy to incorporation). The state may, of its own doing, transform itself into a war machine. It may moreover appropriate to itself an existing war machine or help to create one. War machines function by borrowing from regular armies while incorporating new elements well adapted to the principle of segmentation and deterritorialization. Regular armies, in turn, may readily appropriate some of the characteristics of war machines.
A war machine combines a plurality of functions. It has the features of a political organization and a mercantile company. It operates through capture and depredations and can even coin its own money. In order to fuel the extraction. Necropolitics export of natural resources located in the territory they control, war machines forge direct connections with transnational networks.
War machines emerged in Africa during the last quarter of the twentieth century in direct relation to the erosion of the postcolonial state’s capacity to build the economic underpinnings of political authority and order. This capacity involves raising revenue and commanding and regulating access to natural resources within a well-defined territory. Correlated to the new geography of resource extraction is the emergence of an unprecedented form of governmentality that consists in the management of the multitudes.The extraction and looting of natural resources by war machines goes hand in hand with brutal attempts to immobilize and spatially fix whole categories of people or, paradoxically, to unleash them, to force them to scatter over broad areas no longer contained by the boundaries of a territorial state.
As a political category, populations are then disaggregated into rebels, child soldiers, victims or refugees, or civilians incapacitated by mutilation or simply massacred on the model of ancient sacrifices, while the “survivors,” after a horrific exodus, are confined in camps and zones of exception. This form of governmentality is different from the colonial commandement. The techniques of policing and discipline and the choice between obedience and simulation that characterized the colonial and postcolonial potentate are gradually being replaced by an alternative that is more tragic because more extreme. Technologies of destruction have become more tactile, more anatomical and sensorial, in a context in which the choice is between life and death.
