A. Mbembe’s Necropolitics: The Nature and Intrinsic Problems of the Postcolonial Sovereignty

This paper explores the concept of necropolitics, developed by leading African political philosopher Achille Mbembe, within the context of decolonization and sovereignty in African states. The paper critically analyzes this concept through its relationship to the classical Hobbesian paradigm of sovereignty and the intellectual genealogy of the concept of biopolitics. The authors identify theoretical lacunae in the universalist model of the social contract, demonstrating its limitations in explaining the structures of violence and exclusion that emerged in the colonial and postcolonial eras. This theoretical reconstruction reveals the content of the concept of necropolitics, defined as a form of sovereign power based on racial hierarchization and the right to determine who lives and who dies. The paper analyzes its key components: the spatial organization of “death worlds,” the status of the “living dead,” the discursive practices of “little death,” and the aesthetic dimension of “brutality.” The main result of the study is the development of a theoretical and methodological framework for analysis, structured around six interrelated parameters (bonds of enmity, the world of death, the little death, racial hierarchization, the mortification of the collective body, and brutality). This methodological apparatus provides a toolkit for analyzing the structures of political violence and allows for a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of political violence, moving beyond traditional Eurocentric approaches. The work contributes to the development of a postcolonial (or decolonial) perspective in political theory and offers a relevant analytical tool for rethinking the dichotomy of violence and security. The necropolitical framework of analysis has the potential to be applied both to the study of African political reality and to the assessment of processes in other regions of the world, consistent with A. Mbembe’s thesis on the “Africanization” of the modern world.