“[Mbembe’s] new book . . . is a precious tool to understand what occurs in the North as well as in the South. The analyses of this faithful reader of Franz Fanon are irrevocable: war has become not an exception but a permanent state, ‘the sacrament of our era’. . . . One of the biggest challenges we have to face, Mbembe warns us, is to defend our democracies while including this ‘other’ whom we don’t want if we are to build our common future.”

- Séverine Kodjo-Grandvaux and Michael Pauron, Jeune Afrique

"[Mbembe's] latest and eminently readable offering . . . speaks to the spirit of our times with such clarity and profundity that it bears all the hallmarks of an instant classic of anti-racist literature."

- Ashish Ghadiali, Red Pepper

"[<i>Necropolitics</i>] is a book that is in places rather complex to read but it is definitely worth persevering with, since it is filled with interesting insights into such issues as racism, the role of borders and separation, terrorism and its political expression and the mundane and everyday forms of enmity and hatred that shape the contemporary world around us."

- John Solomos, Ethnic and Racial Studies

“Hardly a single longform essay, <i>Necropolitics</i> is a portal of intricate thoughts on the state of the planet. … Mbembe’s latest work is a significant contribution to political and critical theory. <i>Necropolitics</i> is the book of this stifling hour, Mbembe its chronicler.”

- Eric Otieno, Postcolonial Studies

<p>“<i>Necropolitics</i> pursues the themes of race and sovereign power as they relate to borders, prisons, war, and policing in the wake of decolonization and the aftermath of the U.S. civil rights struggle…. Mbembe’s commitment to articulating a common humanity as praxis, or as a humanity in creation, when institutions of life-making, care, and social reproduction are subjugated to the overwhelming power of death-making institutions, is what sets <i>Necropolitics</i> apart from other literatures that take up these questions.”</p>

- Anuja Bose, Contemporary Political Theory

"<i>Necropolitics</i> would be a relevant supplementary text for graduate courses in theory political sociology and international relations.… The book provides the reader with fundamental perspectives on race, that align with common critiques of democracy and Foucault's concept of bioppower while drawing on Fanon's work."

- Kendall L. Gilliam, International Social Science Review

"Before Covid-19, Mbembe’s picture of a world enchanted by its own practice of mass murder-suicide in the name of democracy and liberal values seemed accurate enough. After, or during, or whenever we are, Mbembe’s prescience is horrifying, comforting, and absolutely necessary."

- Aria Dean, Artforum

"Some of Mbembe’s most penetrating and sustained meditations on democracy, race, colonialism, and his continued theorization of biopolitics. . . . Corcoran’s translation of Mbembe’s dense philosophical rhetoric manages to communicate its poetic character and vital pulse."

- Patrick Lyons, French Studies

"Mbembe’s work on necropolitics demonstrates how contemporary societies have exited democracy, renewing the camp and other colonial practices to create death worlds and a society of separation. <i>Necropolitics</i> makes an important contribution through outlining the conditions of hatred and separation that constitute contemporary death worlds."

- Patrick Dwyer, Canadian Review of Law and Society

"<i>Necropolitics</i> enriches African Studies while staying away from conventional tropes and stereotypes of identity politics. . . . In relation to African studies, the contribution of Mbembe’s <i>Necropolitics</i> lies in repositioning Africans as a divergent ‘minor’ process committed to actualizing futurity as a site of production of novel ethics, an ethics of connecting with the African past not as something dead and gone, but as emblematic of ‘a living labor’ that might produce the new Earth."

- Saswat Samay Das, Dibyendu Sahana, Africa Spectrum