Necropolitics

In the AI Story

Mbembe developed necropolitics against the backdrop of the postcolony, where the formal end of colonial rule did not end the colonial distribution of life chances. The death-world is not always literal death. It is the condition of populations held in permanent precarity, whose labor is extracted and whose existence is rendered disposable. The plantation, the colony, the apartheid bantustan, the refugee camp, the occupied territory — these are the paradigmatic necropolitical spaces, and their logic persists in the surveillance capitalism and platform economies of the present.

In the AI context, necropolitics operates at multiple levels. The training corpus encodes a hierarchy of knowledge: English-language, Western, digitized text is abundantly represented; oral traditions, minority languages, indigenous epistemologies are absent or marginal. The model that emerges is not a neutral mirror of human knowledge but a political artifact that inscribes the metropolitan fishbowl into the infrastructure of future creation. What is absent from the corpus is, functionally, dead to the machine — and when the machine becomes the dominant interface to human knowledge, what is dead to the machine becomes increasingly dead to culture.

The concept also illuminates the labor infrastructure of AI. The plantation logic of content moderation — in which workers in Kenya, the Philippines, and Colombia are exposed to violent and traumatic material at wages a fraction of what equivalent labor commands in San Francisco — is necropolitical in Mbembe's precise sense. The smooth interface celebrated in the metropolitan discourse depends on bodies rendered invisible and expendable. To celebrate AI creativity without confronting this arrangement is to reproduce the foundational gesture of colonial modernity.

Necropolitics is not a theory of intention. Silicon Valley engineers do not wake up planning to extract from the Global South. The concept names a structural arrangement that operates regardless of individual intent — an arrangement whose logic precedes and shapes the choices available to those who work within it. This is what makes the concept so useful for thinking about AI: it forces the question of whose signal the amplifier was built to carry, and whose was extracted to feed it.

Origin

Mbembe introduced the term in a 2003 essay in Public Culture, later expanded into the 2019 book Necropolitics. The concept draws on Foucault's biopolitics, Agamben's bare life, and Fanon's phenomenology of the colonized, but departs from all three by centering the racial and colonial specificity of the power to kill — a dimension the European theorists tended to universalize away.

The concept has traveled widely across postcolonial studies, critical race theory, and increasingly into media and technology studies, where it has been applied to border enforcement algorithms, predictive policing, and — most recently — the political economy of large language models.

Key Ideas

Sovereignty is about death. The highest expression of sovereign power is not the right to legislate life but the right to determine who may be killed or let die.

Death-worlds persist. The plantation, the colony, the camp are not historical artifacts. Their logic is reproduced in contemporary arrangements — including the digital infrastructure of the AI age.

The corpus is political. Training data encodes a hierarchy of which knowledge lives and which dies. The absence of a language or tradition from the corpus is not a neutral omission but a necropolitical act.

Structural, not intentional. Necropolitics operates through systems, not through malice. Engineers building with good intentions can still participate in death-worlds whose logic they did not design.

The nocturnal body. Every smooth interface has a shadow — the labor, the extraction, the exposed bodies that the daylight discourse refuses to illuminate.

Debates & Critiques

Critics have argued that necropolitics risks universalizing a specific colonial experience into a master frame for all contemporary power, and that its application to digital infrastructure can obscure the genuine differences between physical death and informational marginalization. Defenders respond that these differences are real but the structural continuities are more important, and that the refusal to see the continuities is itself a feature of the metropolitan fishbowl.