Abandonment, Pt. 2: Scattered Thoughts on Necropolitics
NOTE: This little essay started off as a bit of a a follow-on to the other short piece that I recently wrote on the theme of abandonment. Parts of this one were initially meant to be included in that article, but in the end they did not fit very neatly and so I decided to try to flesh them out a bit more fully on their own. In doing so they ended up taking on something of a life of their own. That said… this one is going to be a bit more fuzzy and fragmentary, in part a result of the fact that it’s just an idea that I’ve been tossing around in my head and in part to the sad reality that all of my notes and books that I might have been able to consult are in boxes…)
In my last post, I wrote about how, it seems to me, Ukraine is being abandoned in two different senses: firstly, it has fallen victim to the attention economy, and the Western public, perhaps not too surprisingly, has to a certain degree moved on. Secondly, Ukraine is slowly and quietly being politically abandoned by its allies in the West, who have, despite loud and self-congratulatory declarations, turned their attention elsewhere: they have rarely lived up to their own commitments, particularly when it has come to providing both offensive and defensive weapons to defend against Russia.
These two abandonments, of course, are locked into something of a feedback loop: diminished public interest means that elected officials deprioritize it, believing that they can derive less benefit from the issue, which in turn drives the attention economy even further away from Ukraine, leading to even less public attention, and so on…
(Note: it could be argued that the recent U.S. aid package and rumblings in Europe about supporting Ukraine are evidence that I’m wrong about all of this. That’s fair, and I certainly hope I’m wrong! But I think — and I’m not alone in this — that American aid henceforth is going to be increasingly sporadic and it remains to see what Europe will be willing (or able) to do to help Ukraine, particularly in the short- medium-term. Sorry to be the pessimist.)
In any case, I have also been thinking about the abandonment of Ukraine through another lens: namely, what the historian and philosopher Achille Mbembe has dubbed “necropolitics.” Drawing on the work of Michel Foucualt, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, and others, Mbembe argues that “the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree in the power and the capacity to decide who may live and who must die” (Mbembe, p. 11).
(Note: Mbembe is careful to specify that his notion of sovereignty “distances itself from traditional accounts of sovereignty… [that] locate sovereignty within the boundaries of the nation-state, within institutions empowered by the state, or within supranational institutions and networks” (p. 11). Ultimately, he argues, “to exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power” in a more diffuse sense (p. 12)).
The idea of necropolitics has been used before as a lens through which to try to make sense of contemporary Russia, particularly vis-a-vis its genocidal invasion of Ukraine. For example, in a June 2022 article for Novaya Gazeta, Svetlana Stevenson argued that the war was not simply the outcome of inert “geopolitical realities” or a quest for security against “NATO expansion.” Rather, she contends, as the Russian state became increasingly disinterested in vouchsafing the welfare of its own people, while elites grew obscenely wealthy from theft and looting, it turned to war — or at least the mythology of war — to justify its own existence by anchoring its legitimacy in the (heavily mediated) collective memory of the “Great Patriotic War.”
Both in the public rhetoric of the authorities, and in the fight against the vital forces of society (such as the free press and civil society institutions), the agenda of development and prosperity has gradually been replaced by the agenda of death. There is an ongoing historical rehabilitation of Stalin and Ivan the Terrible, rulers who willingly expended the lives of their own population and left behind unprecedented depopulation. There is an unfolding cult of the fallen soldier. Schools across Russia are seeing the massive introduction of World War II-related rituals, often led by local military and church officials. Intimate, living memories of the ancestors who died so that there would be no more wars are replaced by grim necro-celebrations.
Ultimately, Stevenson argues, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “the result of a lengthy process of replacing the logic of development and life with the logic of destruction and death, the logic of necropolitics.”
Calling Russia a “death cult,” Denis Zakharov has pointed out in a perceptive Twitter thread that also draws upon necropolitics as a framework for understanding Russia, during a meeting with the mothers of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine:
The only time Putin looks visibly satisfied is when he concludes to a grieving mother, that her son completed his goal by dying. He smiles when he speaks about this — he sees people’s only function is to die at the right time and place.
Russians’ apathy in the face of the ghastly human toll of this death cult — according to one estimate roughly 450,000 have already been killed or wounded in Ukraine— would seem to belie Stephenson’s hope that “[w]e can expect that the disastrous political imagination and actions of the ruling elite will increasingly come into conflict with the people’s instinct to live.” However, I do think that she is nevertheless correct in identifying “an immanent process of sacrifice, in which the population must forever defend the land, forever shed blood.”
But whose blood must be shed?
Mbembe reminds us that, for Foucault, race (which includes, but also is not limited to, phenotypical markers like skin color) is ultimately the question of “a separation between those who must live and those who must die.” Consequently, he argues, the very existence of the “Other” ultimately represents “an attempt on my life… a mortal threat or absolute danger whose biophysical elimination would strengthen my potential to life and security” (18). Indeed, as Stephenson notes, necropolitics requires the “constant search for enemies, the ideological or racial ‘Other’, states of emergency and new wars.”
It is hard to avoid seeing Russia’s genocide in Ukraine in these terms. It is, after all, an unambiguous attempt by a declining empire to revitalize itself through a war against the Ukrainian “Other.” Moreover, Ukrainians are presented, in official statements, state propaganda, and Putin’s own speeches, as little more than defective Russians, a fallen people whose language, culture, and identity have been warped and perverted by “the West,” and whose claims to statehood and sovereignty are not only illegitimate, but intolerable for the health and existence of the Russian state.
And so the death cult, having prepared its own subjects to expend their lives for the health of the state, has manufactured an Other against whom they will struggle and die to perpetrate the genocide of a supposedly “brotherly nation.” However, I would argue that a form of racialized Othering also plays a role in the abandonment of Ukraine by many in the West as well, who all too often comprehend Ukrainians and other Eastern Europeans as their intellectual, political, and cultural inferiors.
As Aleksandra Lewicki points out, this sort of condescension has a long pedigree:
people who move from Europe’s East to its West are perceived as ‘strangers,’ ‘migrants,’ or ‘foreign nationals’ and their experiences are shaped by their immigration status. Yet…they are also categorized as ‘Eastern European’ — a homogenising label that carries ambiguous racial connotations (Lewicki, p. 1494).
Thus, for example, even beyond the Nazis’ treatment of Eastern Europeans as “Slavic subhumans” worthy only of enslavement and extermination, the eastern part of Europe has long been enmeshed in what she labels as “spatialized hierarchies of civilization” (p. 1485) and portrayed as “undemocratic and underdeveloped and in need of ‘catching up’ with the West” (p. 1486). Consequently,
[v]arious regions (with their diverse histories and languages), including the Baltic States, Central East Europe or the Balkans have…been folded into the category ‘Eastern Europe’ and imagined as a barbarian, backward, irrational, or underdeveloped (semi-)periphery” (p. 1485).
Moreover, she writes, “‘Eastern Europeans’ are imagined a lesser breed, carriers of disease, specifically skilled manual workers, a strain on public services, and criminal tricksters” (p. 1484), in addition to being blamed, among other things, for the spread of COVID in Western Europe and being parasitic “welfare tourists” (p. 1491). Indeed, in a revealing example of the the interconnected nature of different forms of racism, Eastern Europeans are frequently derided as human traffickers and “facilitators of ‘the great replacement’ — the scenario at the heart of anti-Muslim racist ideology” (p. 1492).
All of this, Lewicki argues, reflects a “racialization of ‘Eastern Europeans’ [that] is co-constitutive of the political-economic peripheralization of the region” (p. 1494). Ultimately, Lewicki writes,
[t]hese trends…institutionalize a systematic reliance of cheap labor from Europe’s East, externalize its social costs, and enable the removal of those who become too ‘costly’; they normalize the extraction of precarious labor and institutionalize the relocation of its costs to Europe’s East — and thereby reinforce the peripheralization of the region (p. 1495).
I would argue that it is this perhipheraliation, and the racism that enables it, that undergirds the sort of abandonment that I am concerned with here.
Without going too far into the weeds, I do think there is a certain resonance between what is happening in Ukraine and the work of Giorgio Agamben. In particular, Agamben describes the classical distinction between bios, which might be thought of as the kind of life characterized by qualities and desires and narratives — that is, the sort of life we commonly think of as making us quintessentially human and, importantly, is invested with political significance — and zoē, which refers to the simple biological fact of being alive.
Agamben further develops this distinction into an analysis of what he terms “bare life,” wherein bios is fully subsumed by zoē — essentially Foucault’s conceptualization of biopolitics. Central to the production of this bare life, moreover, is what he calls the “state of exception,” a concept borrowed from the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt (who is currently getting a bit of a workout in the U.S. Supreme Court these days…). The state of exception is the ultimate expression of “sovereign power”: it is the power to decide on the suspension of the law. It is, in other words, the power to abandon:
He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable (Agamben, p. 23).
The abandoned person, is Agamben’s homo sacer who can be killed without penalty, “emblematiz[ing] the sovereign’s power over life and death, the power to designate a life that is worth neither saving nor killing” (emphasis mine).
Famously, Agamben writes that the state of exception and the abandonment by the law find its fullest expression in “the camp” — that is, the Nazi concentration camp. But the notion of “the camp” has also been applied to other spatial contexts as well: refugees; the inhabitants of favelas and other informal communities; etc.
As Philip Armstrong notes:
Understood as a condition, abandonment is… recognized in a number of pertinent contexts or recognizable situations, in which people or certain parts of a population are subject to radical insecurity, uncertainty, precarious existence, capture, and vulnerability […]
Situated on a planetary scale, appeals to abandonment… refer to different parts of the world in which peoples are severed from the connections, associations, visibility or sense of belonging granted to or experienced by others, opening up areas, regions or zones of the world characterized by neglect, desertion, rejection, exile, invisibility, dispossession, the loss of global interdependency and opportunity…” (pp. 40–1).
I would argue that the precarious existence of Ukrainians under nightly — or hourly, in some places — air raids that could be prevented, but are not (an air raid siren went off in Kyiv at 2:20 pm on May 9, just as I was editing this, in fact), represents precisely this sort of abandonment, which has been facilitated by the sort of racialized peripheralization of Ukraine and Eastern Europe in Western discourses that Lewicki identified.
I don’t think it’s difficult to see how all of this connects Mbembe’s notions of necropolitics, of sovereignty as the power and capacity to decide on who lives and who dies, and of what he calls death-worlds: those “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead” (p. 40).
“[U]nder what practical conditions,” he asks,
is the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised? Who is the subject of this right? What does the implementation of such a right tell us about the person who is thus put to death and about the relation of enmity that sets that person against his or her murderer?
What we are ultimately talking about here, is not only the Russian state’s war to exterminate Ukraine, but also the hesitation (or unwillingness) of Ukraine’s Western partners to provide the help it needs to win, needlessly sacrificing lives in the meantime.
Witness, for example, the months-long drama involving the provision of American military aid to Ukraine. Although the aid package has finally been passed, it has never been clearer that life in Ukraine, both at the front and among civilians, exists in a state of extreme precarity, subject to the whims of an increasingly unreliable partner that assigns Ukrainian lives a lesser value.
Thus, whether or not soldiers at the front have enough ammunition to defend their homes and their families; whether the Ukrainian state has enough air defense missiles to prevent Russia from destroying more critical energy infrastructure and plunging the whole country into the dark; whether, on any given day, one or another ordinary person will wake up, take a shower, go out to coffee, and then be incinerated by a missile is, to a frightening degree, dependent on the whims of a global power that is, at best, largely interested in Ukraine for domestic or geopolitical reasons that have little to do with ethics or moral imperatives.
Furthermore, as we have seen, Mbembe emphasizes that necropolitics is bound up with the “capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not” (p. 27). Citing the example of Palestine, which he calls “the most accomplished form of necropower” (p. 27), he describes the
orchestrated and systematic sabotage of the enemy’s societal and urban infrastructure network complements the appropriation of land, water, and airspace resources. Critical to these techniques of disabling the enemy is bulldozing: demolishing houses and cities; uprooting olive trees; riddling water tanks with bullets; bombing and jamming electronic communications; digging up roads; destroying electricity transformers; tearing up airport runways; disabling television and radio transmitters; smashing computers; ransacking cultural and politico-bureaucratic symbols of the proto-Palestinian state; looting medical equipment. In other words, infrastructural warfare. (p. 29)
This could well be a description of daily life almost anywhere in Ukraine, couldn’t it?
And yet, I think it is safe to say that if these outrages were being perpetrated against Poland or Czechia, to say nothing of Germany or France, the West’s response would be rather more urgent than it has been for Ukraine, where concerns about “escalation” have governed the pace of aid deliveries and the conditions according to which it may be used.
And, in the meantime, people die. Some lives matter more — and are more disposable — than others.
After all, Ukraine remains quintessentially an “Other” vis-a-vis the European community, even as Ukrainians fight and die for the European ideal. Their lives and their sacrifices are met with empathy, perhaps, but aid has arrived much more slowly than it should have, in smaller quantities than promised, and that delay has been bought with dead Ukrainians, razed cities, and broken lives.
Ukraine’s alterity is also revealed in the grotesque alliance in the West between reactionaries and fascists on the right and putative “anti-imperialists” and others on the left, who routinely deploy a dizzying array of excuses and justifications for abandoning millions of people and vast swathes of territory to Russian occupation, torture, rape, and death.
Such people, I suspect, know full well that occupied territories will become, at best, the gangster fiefdoms that took shape in the Russian-controlled L/DNR “republics” (which, curiously, resemble nothing more than the amorphous, territorialized “war machines” that Mbembe describes — see: pp. 30–35). At worst, of course, the occupied territories will become the sorts of nauseating charnel houses that we have seen uncovered in liberated parts of Kherson Oblast and elsewhere.
These people have simply decided, for one reason or another, that this simply does not matter to them: Ukrainians are, for them, of precisely zero value, except as rhetorical devices (even though many of them cynically try to present themselves as the only ones who actually care about Ukrainian lives).
To take but one example, Tyler Austin Harper, a “literary scholar working at the intersection of the history of science, philosophy, and environmental studies” at Bates College and a contributor to The Atlantic and the New York Times, wrote in an August 2023 Twitter thread that he “[doesn’t] think it’s worth risking the fate of the planet over a struggling democracy.” Deploying shopworn “American proxy war against Russia” tropes and bizarrely questioning whether or not Vladimir Putin actually believes the things he says about Russian history, Harper appealed to his own authority as “a guy who spends too much of his day thinking about human extinction professionally” to justify his indifference to Ukrainian death by inventing a doomsday scenario in which Russia nukes the world for some reason.
Harper judges Ukrainians acceptable sacrifices for “the greater good” — homines sacres, in other words, who can be killed without guilt. Bare life.
He tries to couch his indifference by smugly intoning that “calling Ukraine a democracy is, politely, a stretch” (drawing, no doubt, on his deep knowledge of the country and its political system) and gesturing vaguely towards “a range of democratic metrics” according to which the country scores “poorly.”
But of what possible relevance is this to the argument he is supposedly making? Would Harper be less inclined to let Ukrainians suffer and die if their “democratic metrics” were more favorable? Perhaps, in the end, he would consider it worth “risking the fate of the planet” over a more “democratic”; more “advanced”; less “backwards”; more “Western” country.
But not Ukraine.
The truth , of course, is that he is not particularly concerned about “democratic metrics” at all (nor, I suspect, about any actual threat of nuclear war). Rather, he is simply indifferent to Ukrainian life and has merely selected a handful of convenient arguments to disguise the fact that he simply doesn’t care about Ukraine or the people who live there at all.
They are beneath him. Lives on the periphery, bereft of the right sorts of metrics and credentials. Abandoned to genocide because he worries about “the fate of the planet.”
I single out Harper here, of course, not because he is particularly interesting or notable, nor because he has any special knowledge of Ukraine that might give his opinions some kind of intellectual heft. He may be unusually stupid and crude, but he is at least refreshingly honest about his callous disinterest, and there’s a certain value in that.
He is, I think, emblematic of the great many people for whom Ukraine and Ukrainians are, in the final analysis, boring and disposable. His is a vulgar necropolitics of indifference towards the Other, draped in the shabby, stinking rags of humanitarian piety.
In any case, I apologize for the somewhat rambling nature of this little essay. It represents a haphazard attempt to bring into (slightly) better focus some of the ideas that have been knocking around in my head for a couple of months. While I fully admit that it’s a bit more scattered than some of the other things that I’ve written here, I nevertheless do think there is something to be said about how, between the daily experience of Russian genocide and its slow-motion abandonment by its allies (some Ukrainians are already noting that this is likely to be the last big U.S. Aid package to Ukraine this year, and perhaps ever), Ukraine can be understood through the lens of Mbembe’s “death-worlds.”
Ukrainians are poised between peripheralization, abandonment and annihilation on the one hand, and, on the other, having the means to defend themselves — but ensuring access to the weapons that they need to simply survive is largely beyond their their ability to control. They are at the mercy of fickle allies who may decide at any time that, in the name of “peace,” “stability,” or simply (ahem) “war weariness” and the realities of electoral politics, they are disposable after all.
Their lives are treated by those who enjoy the privilege of safety under NATO skies as too backwards, too problematic, too flawed, too deficient according the right “metrics” to be worth preserving.
Remember again Agamben’s homo sacer: the one who can be killed without penalty, “a life that is worth neither saving nor killing.” For those like Tyler Austin Harper or any of those throngs who have decided that Ukraine is teeming with “Nazis”; is an outpost of the American empire; or somehow “provoked” Russia, and so deserves its fate, Ukraine is not even an abstraction — they know little or nothing about it and won’t ever care to. Rather, Ukraine is a trope and Ukrainian life is, ultimately, without any inherent worth.
I think, maybe, this precarity and abandonment, this consignment to the status of the “living dead,” as Mbembe would have it, is what I was trying to get at in my last essay when when I wrote:
As I sit here in Kyiv, watching thousands of beautiful and flawed and ordinary and wonderful and vital and innocent people walk past me every day… I see skeletons; refugees; slaves; rape victims. I hear it in every air raid siren.
When people, whether ordinary citizens, academics and media personalities, or elected officials, decide to abandon Ukraine and shrug in indifference at genocide… this is not merely a symptom of “war weariness” or waning interest; a question of policy; or a deeply considered ethical choice (whether couched in deontological or utilitarian terms).
It is, ultimately, an expression of the devaluation of life itself; a decision about who is disposable and who is not.
I’d also like to acknowledge Dr. Halyna Ilina of Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv, with whom my conversations helped to shape my thinking on a lot of the issues I touched on in this essay.
References:
Agamben, G. (1995). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press: Stanford.
Armstrong, P. (2021). “Notes on Abandonment.” In Vij, R., Kazi, T. and Wynne-Hughes, E. (eds), Precarity and International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan: Cham. pp. 37–61.
Lewicki, A. (2023). “East–west Inequalities and the Ambiguous Racialisation of ‘Eastern Europeans’.” Journal of Ethnic & Migration Studies 49:6, pp. 1481–1499 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2154910
Mbembe, A. (2003). “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15:1, pp. 11–40.
