Necropolitics at large: pandemic politics and the coloniality of the global access gap

Abstract

This intervention advances a conceptualisation of privileged vs. delayed access to pharmaceutical products globally. Critiquing calls for equitable distribution of Covid-19 vaccines by the same Western leaders who pre-ordered millions of doses for exclusive use, I recast the global access gap as necropolitics at large: a generalised necropolitics not predicated on weapons and annihilation as Achille Mbembe proposes, but on negligence, acquiescence and utter disregard for the fatal implications of global inequality (i.e. uneven and inconsistent access to pharmaceutical products). The suffix ‘at large’ denotes the dispersal of necropolitics in space and time, emphasising that it is not pandemics that are necropolitical, but the global systems that govern them – and us. For Mbembe, Foucauldian biopower no longer accounts for contemporary forms of life’s subjugation to death’s power. He proposes the concept of necropolitics to examine the crisis of liberal democracy, war, terror and the prospect of repair. Mbembe’s necropolitics describe a structure of terror that proliferates by inverting life and death. Building on Foucault, he argues that sovereignty is presently exerted by controlling mortality, and that life has come to depend on the deployment of this power (Mbembe 2019, 60). Mbembe is concerned with the figures of sovereignty who instrumentalise human existence and destroy populations, figures who constitute the nomos of the present political space (Mbembe 2019, 68). In this view, late modern sovereignty relies on the power to create a group of people who, unceasingly confronted by death, live at life’s edge. It is a right to kill that recalls the lethal combination of colonial terror: biopower, a state of exception and a state of siege (Mbembe 2019). Mobilising the concept, Christopher J. Lee argues that the deployment of basic techniques of territorial state power to control Covid-19 constituted a reactionary necropolitics that laid bare the global unevenness of state capacity. For Lee, however, ‘the necropower dynamics of Covid-19 and other epidemics, whether Ebola or HIV, are of slow violence’ (Lee 2020), as the power over who may live and who must die is outsourced globally. Other scholars have similarly argued that the decline of the welfare state has reorganised sovereign state power towards the management of death (Robertson and Travaglia 2020). This intervention specifically turns to the longitudinal violence of the global access gap (‘the gap’) which has been salient in pandemic politics and defining for pharmaceutical markets since the late 20th century.