Climate necropolitics
I have been thinking of politics and death recently. In fact it’s all I can think about. I think you should too.
“Necropolitics” is the politics of death. Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe came up with this term to describe the death-inflicting politics of colonialism: conditions where those in power don’t have to care who lives or dies. The priorities of the colonisers are elsewhere, in land, power and wealth grabs. The colonised are left in conditions where their lives are not even secondary, but irrelevant.
Necropolitics is the politics of being in conditions that are death-adjacent, death-inducing. Those who survive (or not) under it are constantly reminded that their lives are nothing, of no consequence, no concern, of those in power.
Our time has SO many necropolitics: the genocide in Gaza demonstrates just how worthless Palestinian lives are to European and US governments (while Israel just wants them dead). Geopolitics for the United Arab Emirates is necropolitics for millions in Sudan. Our fortress borders are necropolitics for migrants, and austerity is simply economic necropolitics. These all serve as so many repeated proofs that our lives are worthless (or worse) to those in power.
Climate necropolitics operates on an even larger and longer scale. Global scorching puts us in conditions of more and more frequent near death: deadly heatwaves, mega fires, super floods. Food supplies become uncertain, drinking water rare, new diseases spread. Every year, we are touched by some of these, as the angel of climate death swoops down lower and lower over our houses.
It’s a waiting and suffering game. This year, I think my family will survive the heat wave. Next year? The one after that? This year, I will still be able to keep some trees in our town watered and alive. Next year? The one after that? At some point, it won’t be enough. This year, the forests in our region didn’t suffer too badly, only a few trees died. Next year? The year after that? At some point, too many will dry up. It’s only a matter of time before we see the flames of forest fire crawling over our formerly green hills, coming down to smoke up our valleys.
Under necropolitics, every decision we make becomes about survival, about prolonging the waiting game. Which clothes will protect me best in the heat wave, which neighborhood is less likely to flood. Which apartment to choose: those that used to be safe, even desirable, have now become deadly heat traps. What about those who make the wrong decisions, or who can’t afford the right ones? They lose faster, they die in greater numbers.
Climate necropolitics means we are being sacrificed. There is nothing passive or natural about this process. Aimé Césaire talked about the “imperial boomerang”, the process by which violence that started against the colonies would be reimported to the colonised. Climate necropolitics is the ultimate imperial boomerang: the great economic and industrial forces that pushed European countries to take over land and wealth are now coming home to roost, on a planetary scale. The great fossil fuel companies are the great powers of our time, some even taking on state form. Exxon-Mobil, BP, Shell, Gazprom, Saudi Aramco: they have all decided that power and wealth is worth more than all of our lives. We don’t see fossil fuel company CEOs (and of course all who support them) roam our neighborhoods, emissaries of the angel of death, from house to house, taking here one person, there another, out to the killing fields. But they are, and they know they are. They have made the calculation, and our lives, well, just don’t matter to them.
Sitting in the midst of the European heatwave, 4 in the morning, almost bearable outside now, I wonder what would change if we could recognise these monsters for who they are. If we could recognise necropolitics as an attack on all of us, if we could be motivated to fight back and resist. Like any colonising power, the fossil fuel industry and their friends have set up infrastructures to maintain their power. These range from legal traps to mass disinformation, from political corruption to creating a neoliberal culture of helpless individuals. The range and scope of these infrastructures is itself breathtaking, but it also shows that they know we could and would overthrow them if given even half a chance.
Bracing for the heat of the day, I wonder where we could find that half a chance …
