Professor Press

“The ultimate expression of sovereignty largely resides in the power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die. To kill or to let live thus constitutes sovereignty’s limits, its principal attributes. To be sovereign is to exert one’s control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.”

Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics

Achille Mbembe is one of the most consequential African philosophers and political theorists of his generation — a thinker whose work has permanently altered the intellectual landscape of postcolonial studies, critical race theory, and political philosophy. Born in 1957 in Otélé, Cameroon, Mbembe has spent more than four decades constructing a body of thought that refuses easy borders: between philosophy and history, between the archive and lived experience, between the African continent and the broader world it has always been part of making. His writing has reshaped how scholars, activists, and policymakers understand sovereignty, race, colonialism, and the politics of life and death — insisting, always, that to think seriously about the present, one must reckon honestly with the long shadow of empire.

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An Intellectual Formation

Mbembe’s intellectual journey began in France, where he pursued graduate study in Paris and earned his doctorate from the Sorbonne — an institution whose own imperial entanglements provided an ironic backdrop for the formation of one of colonialism’s most searching critics. His time in Paris brought him into contact with the great currents of French theory — Foucault, Derrida, Fanon — while simultaneously deepening his engagement with African intellectual traditions and the long history of anti-colonial thought. Rather than simply absorbing these influences, Mbembe learned to hold them in productive tension, subjecting Western theoretical frameworks to the same critical scrutiny they had so rarely turned upon themselves.

Today, Mbembe holds the position of Research Professor in History and Politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg — one of Africa’s most dynamic centres of critical scholarship. His institutional home in Johannesburg is fitting: a city defined by the afterlives of apartheid, by radical inequality and extraordinary cultural vitality, offers a charged environment for the kind of thinking he does. Over the course of his career, he has also held visiting and affiliate positions at some of the world’s most distinguished universities, including Columbia, Duke, UC Berkeley, and the Université de Montréal, testifying to the genuinely global reach of his intellectual project.

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On the Postcolony

Published in 2001, On the Postcolony announced Mbembe as a major theoretical voice with the force and precision of a paradigm shift. The book undertook a radical rethinking of postcolonial African governance, subjectivity, and the aesthetics of power — asking not simply how colonial domination operated, but how it persisted, mutated, and was internalised in the social and political life of the postcolonial state. Mbembe introduced readers to what he called the “commandement” — the inherited structures of authority through which postcolonial rulers reproduce the spectacular, often brutal theatre of power that colonialism had perfected. In doing so, he challenged not only Eurocentric frameworks that condescendingly pathologised African political life, but also the idealised narratives of African nationalism that had too often papered over the new hierarchies and coercions emerging in the wake of independence.

What made On the Postcolony so startling — and so controversial — was its methodological promiscuity: Mbembe drew equally on philosophy, history, psychoanalysis, and literary theory, producing a text that felt as much like an extended essay in the tradition of Fanon as it did a work of political science. Critics objected to what they saw as his pessimistic portrayal of African political culture; others recognised in the book a rare honesty about the difficulties of imagining genuine freedom after colonial rule. Either way, the debate it generated was itself evidence of the book’s generative power. On the Postcolony remains essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how power reproduces itself in societies shaped by the colonial experience.

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Critique of Black Reason

With Critique of Black Reason, published in English translation in 2017, Mbembe expanded his lens from the postcolonial state to the broader architecture of racial modernity. The book is nothing less than a genealogy of “Blackness” as a category of thought — tracing how the idea of the Black subject was produced, weaponised, and sedimented within the interlocking histories of capitalism, slavery, and colonial violence. Drawing on Kant, Hegel, Fanon, and the Black radical tradition, Mbembe asks what it means to think from the position of the colonised — not as an exercise in victimhood, but as a rigorous philosophical stance that exposes the contradictions at the heart of European humanism.

The book’s most provocative contribution may be its insistence that Blackness, historically constructed as the mark of abjection, has simultaneously been a site of extraordinary philosophical, aesthetic, and political creativity. Mbembe refuses the binary that would force a choice between acknowledging the horror of racial subjugation and affirming the humanity of those subjected to it; instead, he holds both truths together, arguing that the work of critical thought is precisely to inhabit that tension without resolving it prematurely. Critique of Black Reason has found readers well beyond the academy — in art studios, activist networks, and literary circles — which is perhaps the highest tribute to its achievement.

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Necropolitics refers to the power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die.

Achille Mbembe

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Necropolitics and the Deathworld

If a single concept has made Mbembe’s name synonymous with urgent political theory globally, it is necropolitics. First developed in a landmark 2003 essay published in the journal Public Culture, and later expanded into the full-length book Necropolitics in 2019, the concept represents Mbembe’s most sustained and internationally debated contribution to political philosophy. Taking Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics — the modern state’s investment in managing, regulating, and optimising life — as its point of departure, Mbembe asks what happens when we look not at the management of life but at the administration of death. Sovereign power today, he argues, operates not merely by regulating life but by determining, systematically and often racially, who may live and who must die.

Central to this analysis is the concept of “deathworlds” — spaces where populations are subjected not to sudden execution but to drawn-out, structural conditions of death-in-life: the slow violence of dispossession, the attrition of displacement, the grinding precarity of those rendered superfluous by contemporary capitalism. Mbembe applies this framework with devastating precision to colonial occupation, contemporary border regimes, racial violence in the Americas, and the asymmetric warfare of the twenty-first century. The Palestinian territories, for instance, feature as a case study in which the apparatus of colonial occupation produces a zone where life and death are suspended in a permanent, administered ambiguity. Necropolitics does not merely describe a theoretical possibility; it names something that millions of people already know from within.

The concept has been received and applied across disciplines — in sociology, geography, literary criticism, legal theory, and public health. During the COVID-19 pandemic, scholars across the world reached for necropolitics to describe the differential distributions of risk, care, and abandonment that mapped so precisely onto existing racial and economic hierarchies. That a philosophical concept born from reflection on colonial Africa could illuminate a global health crisis speaks to the universality that Mbembe’s rigorous specificity makes possible.

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Out of the Dark Night and Afropolitanism

Mbembe’s 2021 work Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization marks something of a pivot — not away from critical diagnosis, but toward the question of possibility. If Necropolitics maps the structures through which contemporary power produces expendable lives, Out of the Dark Night asks what futures might be imagined from within and beyond those structures. Here, Mbembe develops and extends his notion of Afropolitanism — a framework for understanding Africa’s place in a world shaped by migration, hybridity, and planetary entanglement that refuses both nostalgic returns to a pre-colonial past and the melancholic posture of permanent victimhood.

Afropolitanism, as Mbembe conceives it, is emphatically not merely a diasporic identity politics, nor a cosmopolitan liberalism dressed in African garb. It is a relational and forward-looking sensibility — one that takes seriously the fact that Africa has always been connected to the world (through trade, coercion, and cultural exchange) while insisting that those connections be acknowledged on Africa’s own terms. The framework has provoked its share of debate: critics have asked whether it speaks primarily to the experience of educated, mobile Africans and risks overlooking those who lack the resources to move. Mbembe’s response, implicit in the essays themselves, is that Afropolitanism is a philosophical wager, not a sociological description — an aspiration toward a world in which the freedom of movement and self-definition it envisions might be universal.

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Recognition and Ongoing Influence

In 2024, Mbembe was awarded the Holberg Prize — one of the most prestigious honours in the humanities and social sciences, awarded annually by the Norwegian government to scholars who have made outstanding contributions to research. The prize represents the highest institutional recognition of the scope and significance of his intellectual project, and places him in the company of scholars such as Quentin Skinner, Jürgen Habermas, and Julia Kristeva. It is a recognition long overdue, and one that the global scholarly community — from Cape Town to Paris, from New York to Nairobi — had anticipated for years.

Mbembe’s influence now extends across postcolonial theory, African philosophy, critical race studies, and political philosophy in ways that are difficult to fully map. His concepts — the postcolony, necropolitics, deathworlds, Afropolitanism — have entered the shared vocabulary of critical scholarship worldwide, functioning as analytical tools that scholars reach for when existing frameworks prove inadequate to the complexity of what they are trying to understand. Younger African scholars, in particular, have found in his work not just a set of concepts but a permission: to theorise from African experience, in African intellectual traditions, with the same ambition and rigour that European philosophy has always claimed for itself.

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The urgency of Mbembe’s thought has not diminished with time — if anything, it has intensified. In an era marked by the resurgence of authoritarian governance, deepening global inequality, the militarisation of borders, and the persistence of colonial logics in the policies and imaginations of contemporary states, his work arrives not as historical analysis but as live diagnosis. The concepts he has forged over decades give us not merely a vocabulary for naming what is happening — though that is itself no small gift — but a philosophical grammar for imagining what resistance, solidarity, and genuine human freedom might yet look like. For Professor Press, Achille Mbembe represents exactly the kind of thinker this platform exists to celebrate: one who writes from a particular place and history, for the whole world, with the conviction that ideas, carefully and courageously pursued, still have the power to change how we live.