War exercises sovereignty through the right to kill.

Evidence

One could summarize in the above terms what Michel Foucault meant by biopower: that domain of life over which power has taken control. But under what practical conditions 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? Is the notion of biopower sufficient to account for the contemporary ways in which the political, under the guise of war, of resistance, or of the fight against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective? War, after all, is as much a means of achieving sovereignty as a way of exercising the right to kill. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 7

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes necropolitics as the question of who may kill, and biopower as power over life — core scaffolding vocabulary.
• XREF: Connects to Agamben’s state of exception and Schmitt’s war-as-politics that the reader’s Islamophobia module will build on. — connects to: The combatant-to-militant shift expands the right to kill indefinitely; Risk-free warfare erodes the legal principles justifying the right to kill in war. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 128; Conquest founds legitimate sovereignty because the defeated prefer life to death — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 111 (+7 more)

Related

• Sovereign power over life is asymmetrical, always weighted toward killing (similarity 0.83)
• War-waging sovereignty historically treated subjects as owned livestock that sovereigns may slaughter. (similarity 0.82)
• Sovereignty inherently contradicts its protective mandate by holding power of death. (similarity 0.82)
• War can invert from disruption of law into law’s governing principle (similarity 0.81)
• Nineteenth-century power added ‘make live and let die’ alongside sovereign right to kill (similarity 0.81)
• War drives the regular mechanisms of power beneath the law (similarity 0.80)
• Sovereign power makes the subject’s very life and death depend on its will (similarity 0.80)
• Mortality blocks property from becoming a true political principle. (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial sovereignty operates outside legal and institutional rules of warfare (similarity 0.79)
• European sovereignty legitimated states by domesticating and rationalizing war within borders. (similarity 0.79)
• Sovereignty rests on the power to kill, not the power of exception (similarity 0.79)
• Sovereignty fragments into overlapping partial rights to rule. (similarity 0.78)
• Biopower replaces sovereignty’s power over death with power over life (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• The combatant-to-militant shift expands the right to kill indefinitely #expands (0.82)
• Risk-free warfare erodes the legal principles justifying the right to kill in war. #qualifies (0.80) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 128
• War-waging sovereignty historically treated subjects as owned livestock that sovereigns may slaughter. #expands (0.78) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 571
• Conquest founds legitimate sovereignty because the defeated prefer life to death #expands (0.75) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 111
• Sovereign power over life is asymmetrical, always weighted toward killing #expands (0.72) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 255
• European sovereignty legitimated states by domesticating and rationalizing war within borders. #complicates (0.70) — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 75