“Ukraine isn’t a place like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilised, relatively European, city, one where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that isn’t going to happen” – CBS News correspondent Charlie D’Agata
“Palestinians are beasts, they are not human” – Israeli Deputy Defence Minister Rabbi Eli Ben Dahan
“It is emotional because I see European people with blue eyes and blonde hair being killed, children being killed every day” – BBC News
“This is anarchy in the streets… these people are animals” – Fox News on Hurricane Katrina
The world mourns selectively. One victim is a name, a face, a life, whilst another is a number, a statistic, a political talking point. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, yet the world continues to weigh some deaths more heavily than others. In this article, I will examine the colonial origins of necropolitics, the hierarchy of suffering, and the impact of global governance on systematising inequality.
The colonial origins of necropolitics:
Necropolitics is a sociopolitical theory of the use of social and political power to dictate how some people may live and how some must die. Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe argues that necropolitics emerges from the colonial order, where domination depends on transforming entire populations into “death-worlds.” Mbembe extends Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, the governance of life, to examine how modern sovereignty is equally structured around the governance of death. He identifies racism as a prime driver of necropolitics, leading to “unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead”.Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, colonies were used by imperial powers as experimental spaces for sovereign power of death. Colonised peoples were deemed less than human, making their subjugation morally permissible within imperial logic. For instance, the institution and moral rationalisation of slavery rested on the construction of a racial hierarchy that legitimised the subjugation and brutalisation of entire populations. However, this idea is not exclusive to formally colonised people, as these practices persist in the modern world order. The Global North controls life chances in the South through economic dependency, border regimes, and military interventions. For example, The Democratic Republic of the Congo has the largest cobalt reserves in the world, an essential componentin almost every lithium-ion rechargeable battery. All of this cobalt is extracted using varying degrees of abuse, slavery, child labour, and human trafficking. The extraction of mineral wealth for global markets in the DRC hugely benefits the global North, but the Congolese miners are often injured or killed as they dig for cobalt in dangerous underground tunnels. The rights of Congolese people are second to the obtaining of minerals. Here, the colonial logic persists: the lives of Congolese workers remainsubordinated to the material needs of Western modernity. Necropolitics persists, not through colonialism, but through the global supply chain.
The hierarchy of suffering: worthy and unworthy victims
The media plays a significant role in promoting ideas that spur on necropolitics, particularly with the implicit distinction between ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ victims. The use of language is highly important in shaping the biases of a society, and therefore what a society views as an acceptable condition for a group of people to experience. Herman and Chomsky, authors of ‘Manufacturing Consent’, argue that the media frames certain victims as worthy and others as unworthy. The quotes at the start of the article exemplify this. Those who fit Western interests are presented as worthy of the viewers empathy, whilst those killed by Western allies or within marginalised zones are not afforded the same luxury. The ‘unworthy’ victim becomes conceptually excluded from humanity. This has profound implications for foreign policy. This differential framing mirrors what Chomsky and Herman identified as the division between worthy and unworthy victims. Media headlines often emphasise fear whilst describing suffering in passive terms, subtly allocating moral agency. Such media framing is indicative of deeper hierarchies in international relations. Additionally, for necropolitical systems to function, populations must come to see the deaths of others as either necessary, inevitable, or deserved. Israeli architect Eyal Weizmann argues that this normalisation of militarised language constructs a “civilian-military continuum,” in which the entire Israeli public is enlisted into the project of securitisation. the reduction of importance of certain lives is not incidental, but deliberately manufactured in pursuit of a political goal. Necropolitics, therefore, is not simply exercised through military violence, but through the cultivation of perception, a slow and pervasive conditioning of who is seen as grievable, and who is not.
The role of Global governance
Today, necropolitical power clearly operates through global institutions. Compared to explicit imperial rule, life is not denied violently. Rather, it is silently, bureaucratically withdrawn. This can be seenthrough strategically provided humanitarian aid, managing death whilst preserving global hierarchies. Take, for example, the IMF, an ostensibly neutral institution that determines who receives relief and who endures austerity. Importantly, access to aid is contingent upon states adopting neo-liberal reforms.More often that not, these hasty readjustments are not in line with the needs of a state, and systematically reduce access to healthcare, education, and food security across the board. Didier Fassin calls this the ‘humanitarian reason’ of global governance, a regime that manages suffering in the name of compassion, whilst maintaining the inequalities that produce it. The response to the crisis in Haiti exemplifies the dangers of an increasingly politicised, bureaucratised system of humanitarian aid. Following the 2010 earthquake, which killed over 200,000 people, the global response appeared humanitarian, yet its effects revealed the colonial legacies that continue to underpin international aid. In Haiti, life is not extinguished through overt violence but through procedural neglect and external control. The right to live and rebuild is mediated through the bureaucracies of aid and debt. Ultimately, Haiti reveals how the necropolitics of empire persist under the guise of humanitarianism, whereinhumanitarianism masks a global order that decides which nations are worthy of true support, and which groups of people deserve to be saved.
