11 Necropolitics Achille Mbembe Translated by Libby Meintjes Wa syo’lukasa pebwe Umwime wa pita [He left his footprint on the stone He himself passed on] Lamba proverb, Zambia T his essay assumes that the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. 1 Hence, to kill or to allow to live constitute the limits of sovereignty, its Public Culture 15(1): 11–40 Copyright © 2003 by Duke University Press This essay is the result of sustained conversations with Arjun Appadurai, Carol Breckenridge, and Françoise Vergès. Excerpts were presented at seminars and workshops in Evanston, Chicago, New York, New Haven, and Johannesburg. Useful criticisms were provided by Paul Gilroy, Dilip Para- meshwar Gaonkar, Beth Povinelli, Ben Lee, Charles Taylor, Crawford Young, Abdoumaliq Simone, Luc Sindjoun, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Carlos Forment, Ato Quayson, Ulrike Kistner, David Theo Goldberg, and Deborah Posel. Additional comments and insights as well as critical support and encouragement were offered by Rehana Ebr-Vally and Sarah Nuttall. The essay is dedicated to my late friend Tshikala Kayembe Biaya. 1. The essay distances itself from traditional accounts of sovereignty found in the discipline of political science and the subdiscipline of international relations. For the most part, these accounts locate sovereignty within the boundaries of the nation-state, within institutions empowered by the state, or within supranational institutions and networks. See, for example, Sovereignty at the Millen- nium, special issue, Political Studies 47 (1999). My own approach builds on Michel Foucault’s critique of the notion of sovereignty and its relation to war and biopower in Il faut défendre la société: Cours au Collège de France, 1975–1976 (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 37–55, 75–100, 125–48, 213–44. See also Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer. Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 23 – 80. T Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-pdf/15/1/11/510260/pc15.1-02mbembe.pdf by GLASGOW UNIV LIBRARY user on 21 December 2021