Mbembe — Necropolitics
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Duke University Press, 2019; original essay 2003)
The Argument
Sovereignty, in its most fundamental expression, is not the power to make laws or govern populations. It’s the power to determine who may live and who must die — or, more precisely, who is exposed to conditions of death. Mbembe calls this necropolitics: the politics of death, the management of populations through the creation of “death-worlds.”
Mbembe extends Foucault’s biopolitics (the management of life) to its shadow: the management of death. Where Foucault described how modern states optimize life — through public health, education, population management — Mbembe asks about the populations that are excluded from optimization. The ones left to die, or made to die slowly.
Modern necropolitics does not require gas chambers. It operates through structural exposure: the withdrawal of infrastructure, the denial of resources, the creation of zones where death is a statistical certainty but no individual actor is responsible. Refugee camps. Occupied territories. Neighborhoods of disinvestment. The unhoused.
The Colony as Laboratory
Mbembe argues that colonial governance was the original site of necropolitical experimentation. In the colony, the sovereign could exercise absolute power over life and death without the legal and moral constraints that applied in the metropole. The colony was a space of exception where normal rules did not apply — and the techniques developed there (spatial segregation, population management, calculated abandonment) have been imported back into the metropolitan core.
This reframes urban housing policy. Redlining, restrictive covenants, urban renewal (“Negro removal”), planned shrinkage, predatory lending — these are necropolitical techniques. They don’t kill directly. They create the conditions under which certain populations are systematically exposed to harm, precarity, and slow death.
Relevance to the Project
Mbembe provides the hardest-edged frame for what the project is responding to. The housing market doesn’t just fail to provide affordable housing. It produces populations of disposability — people whose exposure to housing insecurity, displacement, and homelessness is a structural feature, not a bug.
The irreducible minimum is a direct structural refusal of necropolitical logic. It asserts a floor below which no community member can fall — not as charity but as a political commitment. No one in this community is disposable. No one is exposed to conditions of slow death. The ground lease enforces this permanently, against the pressure of a market that would prefer to price them out.
The Durham context makes this concrete. Durham’s history of racial segregation, urban renewal, and gentrification is a necropolitical history — the systematic creation of zones where Black residents were exposed to disinvestment, environmental harm, and displacement. The CLT’s location in Durham carries this history. The project doesn’t get to be innocent of it.
Mbembe also sharpens the question of who gets to be a political subject. Necropolitics creates populations that are managed rather than governing. Public housing residents, voucher holders, the unhoused — they are objects of policy, not agents of self-determination. The cooperative governance model reconstitutes these populations as political beings — people who govern their own community rather than being governed by it.