War machines govern populations by immobilizing or scattering them beyond state borders.

Evidence

The extraction and looting of natural resources by war machines goes hand in hand with brutal attempts to immobilize and spatially fix whole categories of people or, paradoxically, to unleash them, to force them to scatter over broad areas no longer contained by the boundaries of a territorial state. As a political category, populations are then disaggregated into rebels, child soldiers, victims or refugees, or civilians incapacitated by mutilation or simply massacred on the model of ancient sacrifices, while the “survivors,” after a horrific exodus, are confined in camps and zones of exception. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 139

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes the new ‘governmentality of the multitudes’ from earlier forms of rule.
• XREF: Connects to the toolkit’s biopolitics/necropolitics thread and to camps as ‘zones of exception’ (Agamben). — connects to: War drives the regular mechanisms of power beneath the law; External wars are waged partly to keep the domestic population pliant. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 278; Occupying states use engineered chaos and panic as an intelligence-gathering device — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 673
• BMF: The image of a polity ‘unleashing’ populations to scatter beyond state boundaries resonates obliquely with the dispersal of the Ibo people and the fragmenting of community in Things Fall Apart, where colonial rule likewise re-scopes who counts as a person.

Related

• Eroded state revenue capacity gave rise to African war machines (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• War drives the regular mechanisms of power beneath the law #expands (0.75)