Abstract
The section develops the notions of the rule of law necropower and necropolitical governmentalization of the state as the specific forms of necropower in North America. Drawing from Achille Mbembe’s and Michel Foucault’s governmentality, the researcher claims that in third world countries like Mexico, state power intertwines with criminal organizations. Criminal-state merging results in institutions and policy for the administration of death, which in turn leads to the reproduction of illegal capital accumulation—the necropolitical governmentalization of the state. Also, building on competing interpretations of necropower in the first world, the author argues that the United States and Canada enforce their sovereign power of killing not above or below the law but through it. North American first world countries use legal frameworks to accumulate capital through activities that produce death in specific geographies and spaces along the lines of nationality, ethnicity, race, class, and gender. The chapter calls this rule of law necropower. The common ground in both types of necropower is lucrative death.
Keywords
- The rule of law
- Governmentalization of the state
- Biopower
- Capital accumulation
- Disposability
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.
Buying options
Notes
- 1.
The author is aware that the use of the first world-third world binary could be problematic or outdated. However, it is widely used in decolonial and necropolitical approaches as a semantic reaffirmation of the asymmetrical power relations between Western democracies and the rest of the world.
- 2.
The incommensurability of neoliberal capitalism and its ethos of death are developed in ideas such as: zombie capitalism (Harman 2009), which based on Marx’s original concepts focuses on the destructive capacity of capital and its power to put us against us themselves; gangster capitalism (Woodiwiss 2005), which describes how organized crime in the United States has been successful thanks to the support of transnational politicians, bureaucrats and executives; ghost capitalism (Roy 2014), which examines how the demands of global capital have subjected millions of people in India to brutal forms of environmental predation, exploitation and racism; narconomics (Wainwright 2016), which analyzes the productive, distribution and sale chains of drug trafficking from an economic perspective, including internet sales, diversification of illicit merchandise, social responsibility and mergers between cartels; and narco-war capitalism, which suggests that internal conflicts and militarization focus on critical geographies for energy projects and resource extraction (Paley 2014; Harman 2009; Woodiwiss 2005; Wainwright 2016; Roy 2014; Paley 2014).
- 3.
By August 2020, critical media revealed that both Murdoch and Mercer were assessing the possibility that Trump lost the presidential set for November, but their support for Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign is a fact.
- 4.
Power produces subjectivity through discourses and apparatuses, and depending whether life or death is at stake, power objectifies human beings in different ways. The subjectivity produced by the necropolitical apparatus of production and administration of forced migration is a subjected subject: the forced migrant. According to Foucault, there are three modalities of objectification of power through which human beings become subjects: the forms of research that we call sciences; the dividing practices by which the subject is separated within his own body or divided from others, and the techniques through which human beings are willing to become themselves subjects. In biopolitics and necropolitics, subjects are usually a mixture of the three. Biopolitics’ predominant subjectivity is Homo economicus, although jurist Giorgio Agamben argued for a legal version of the neoliberal subject: the homo sacer. Firstly, the homo economicus are entrepreneurs of themselves, and they themselves are their own capital, producer, source of profit and generator of their own satisfaction. The new homo economicus is both consumer and producer. The homo sacer is a political-legal figure from the Ancient world that refers to a person who has been accused and convicted of a crime and while they cannot be sacrificed, anyone who kills them will not be accused of homicide. These individuals are left completely unprotected by the law and their inclusion is solely a result of their exclusion. The bare life of homo sacer is subject to the political only by exception. For Agamben, homo sacer is the person who can be killed but not sacrificed (Agamben 1998, 2001, 2004; Foucault 2004) .
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo sacer. El poder soberano y la nuda vida. España: Pre-textos.
Agamben, Giorgio. 2001. Medios sin fin. España: Pre-textos.
Agamben, Giorgio. 2004. El estado de excepción: Archipiélago.
Banerjee, Bobby. 2008. “Necrocapitalism.” Organization Studies, 29 (12):1541–1563.
Banerjee, Bobby. 2008a. “Necrocapitalism.” Organization Studies, 1541–1563.
Banerjee, Bobby. 2008b. “Necrocapitalism.” Organization Studies, 29 (12):1541–1563.
Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Bingham, Tom. 2011. The Rule of Law: Penguin Books.
Clark, Gordon L. 1985. Judges and the cities: interpreting local autonomy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Delaney, David. 2010. The spatial, the legal and the pragmatics of world-making: nomospheric investigations. London: Routledge.
Delgado Mahecha, Ovidio. 2003. Debates sobre el espacio en la geografía contemporánea. Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
Dworkin, Ronald. 1986. Law’s Empire. Cambridge Massachusetts Harvard University Press.
Estévez, Ariadna. 2018. “Biopolítica y necropolítica: ¿constitutivos u opuestos?“ Espiral, Estudios sobre Estado y Sociedad 25 (73):9–43.
Estévez, Ariadna. 2020. “Mexican Necropolitical Governmentality and the Management of Suffering Through Human Rights Technologies.” Critical Criminology 28:27–42.
Fanon, Frantz. 2012. Los condenados de la tierra Mexico: FCE.
Flores Pérez, Carlos Antonio. 2013. Historias de polvo y sangre: génesis y evolución del tráfico de drogas en el estado de Tamaulipas. México: CIESAS.
Foucault, Michel. 1982. “Technologies of the self. Lectures at University of Vermoint in October 1982.” Foucault.info, accessed July 6. https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.technologiesOfSelf.en/.
Foucault, Michel. 1997a. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Edited by Paul Rabinow. Vol. I, The Essential Works of Michel Foucault: 1954–1984. New York: The New Press New York.
Foucault, Michel. 1997b. Power. Vol. III, Essential Works of Foucault. New York: The New Press.
Foucault, Michel. 2000. Power. Edited by Paul Rabinow. Vol. III, Essential Works of Foucault (1954–1984). New York: The New Press.
Foucault, Michel. 2004. The Birth of Biopolitics. New York: Picador-Palgrave Macmillan.
Foucault, Michel. 2006. Defender la sociedad. México: Fonbdo de Cultura Económica.
Foucault, Michel. 2007. Security, territory, population: lectures at the College de France, 1977–78. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Foucault, Michel. 2008. The birth of biopolitics: lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79. Basingstoke England; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Foucault, Michel. 2013. “Right of death and Power Over Life.” In Biopolitics. A reader, 41–60. London: Duke University Press.
Giroux, Henry. 2014. Neoliberalism and the Machinery of Disposability. Truth-Out (http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/22958-neoliberalism-and-the-machinery-of-disposability).
Giroux, Henry A. 2009. Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalismo. Edited by Tobby Miller. NYC: Peter Lang.
Gržinić, Marina, and Šefik Tatlić. 2014. Necropolitics, Racialization, and Global Capitalism. Historicization of Biopolitics and Forensics of Politics, Art, and Life. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Harman, Chris. 2009. Zombie capitalism: global crisis and the relevance of Marx. London: Bookmarks.
Harvey, David. 2006. Spaces of global capitalism. London; New York, NY: Verso.
Massey, Doreen. 2008. “A Global Sense of Place.” In The Cultural Geographer Reader, edited by Timothy Oakes and Patricia L. Price, 260. NYC: Routledge.
Mbembe, Achille. 1995. “Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis.” Public Culture 7:323–352.
Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15 (1):11–40.
Mbembe, Achille. 2011. Necropolítica. España: Melusina (sic).
Mcdonald, David. 2017. The Harmful Effects Of Canadian Mining In Latin America And The Caribbean Are Potentially Destabilizing The Region. Medium (July 20, 2017): https://medium.com/the-global-millennial/the-harmful-effects-of-canadian-mining-in-latin-america-and-the-caribbean-849177afe21f. Accessed August 3, 2020.
McKibben, Bill. 2020. When it comes to climate hypocrisy, Canada’s leaders have reached a new low. The Guardian (February 5, 2020): https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/05/when-it-comes-to-climate-hypocrisy-canadas-leaders-have-reached-a-new-low.
Montag, Warren 2005. “Necro-economics. Adam Smith and death in the life of the universal.” Radical Philosophy (134).
Nellys, Ashley. 2016. The color of justice: racial and ethnic disparity in state prisons. Washington DC: The Sentencing Project. Research and Advocacy for Reform.
O’Donovan, Katherine. 1989. “Engendering Justice: Women’s Perspectives an the Rule of Law.” The University of Toronto Law Journal 39 (2):127–148.
O’Farrell, Clare. 2005. Michel Foucault: Sage.
Paley, Dawn. 2014. Drug War Capitalism. Oakland: AK Press.
Repo, Jemima. 2016. “Thanatopolitics or biopolitics? Diagnosing the racial and sexual politics of the European far-right.” Contemporary Political Theory 15 (1):110–118.
Rivera, Rubén. 2020. México registró 34,582 asesinatos durante 2019, la cifra más alta en 20 años. Univision Noticias (January 21, 2020). Accessed July 6, 2020.
Roy, Arundhati. 2014. Capitalism: a ghost story. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.
Soja, Edward E. 2009. “The City and Spatial Justice.” Justice Spatiale/ Spatial Justice 1 (1):5.
Suárez, Karina. 2019. Mexico pone en marcha un programa para buscar a 40.000 desaparecidos. El País (Febrero 4, 2019): https://elpais.com/internacional/2019/02/04/mexico/1549301318_972191.html. Accessed May 1, 2019.
The Center for Media and Democracy. 2020. “Alec Exposed. Guns, Prisons, Crime, and Immigration.” https://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/Guns,_Prisons,_Crime,_and_Immigration, accessed August 12, 2020.
Treviño Rangel, Javier. 2020. “Mercancías desechables: políticas de muerte y migración internacional en México.” In Necropolítica y migración en la frontera vertical mexicana. Un ejercicio de conocimiento situado, edited by Ariadna Estévez and Elisa Ortega Velázquez, 105–142. Mexico: Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas UNAM.
Tushnet, Mark. 2016. “Critical Legal Studies and the Rule of Law.” In Cambridge Companion to the Rule of Law edited by Marti Loughlin and Jens Meierhenrich. Cambridge Working Papers.
Valencia, Sayak. 2010. Capitalismo Gore. España: Melusina
Valverde Gefaell, Clara. 2016. De la necropolítica Neoliberal, A la Empatía Radical. Violencia Discreta, Cuerpos Excluidos y Repolitización. Madrid: Icaria.
Wainwright, Tom. 2016. Narconomics: how to run a drug cartel. First edition. ed. New York: PublicAffairs.
Wang, Jackie. 2018. Carceral Capitalism, Intervention. Pasadena, California: Semiotext(e).
Waslin, Michele. 2020. “The Use of Executive Orders and Proclamations to Create Immigration Policy: Trump in Historical Perspective.” Journal on Migration and Human Security 8 (1):54–67.
Woodiwiss, Michael. 2005. Gangster capitalism: the United States and the global rise of organized crime. London: Constable.
Working Group on Mining and Human Rights in Latin America. 2015. The impact of Canadian Mining in Latin America and Canada’s Responsibility Executive Summary of the Report submitted to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Estévez, A. (2021). The Management of Death in North America: From the Necropolitical Governmentalization of the State to the Rule of Law Necropower. In: Estévez, A. (eds) Necropower in North America. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73659-0_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73659-0_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-73658-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-73659-0
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)