A comment on Achille Mbembe’s “Necropolitics & Decolonisation of University”

The concept of sovereignty has been studied in various forms over the past centuries. Achille Mbembe, the Cameronian  historian, critical theorist & public intellectual ,  expands this concept to include control over the body, as well as authority over both life and death (in what is known as mass- killings), while addressing equity between men and women and acting for the general welfare of the people. In addition, Achille’s new philosophical approach draws on Michel Foucault’s analysis of “biopolitics”, Giorgio Agamben’s “Homo Sacer”, Georges Batailles “Eroticism”, & Hannah  Arendt’s book “The  Origins of Totalitarianism”.  He studied and analyzed the concept of sovereignty to include the colonial & post-colonial era, together with the means of decolonizing the university as institution, capitalizing on the desire and capacity of students rather than the market’s priority and the ambition of certifications. The detailed description of how occupying power in Palestine dealt on a daily bases with the occupied, through checkpoints, besieges, humiliation of parents in front of their children, blinding eyes by gummy bullets, confiscation of private & personal papers from people, pissing on walls of houses only for fun, breaking the bones of children, throwing rubbish amid the streets of Palestinian towns as in Hebron-a signal of the systematic strategy to deny dignity and humanity to indigenous people. (This essay was written two decades ago. All the horrors, war crimes and ongoing genocide of nowadays endured by the same people in Gaza and the rest of Palestine are not included in this essay). The new and strong approach of Achille, is that, humanity learned nothing, neither by the concentration camps of the Second World War, nor the extermination of millions of people by Stalin. The “killing fields” that  have been documented in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge are still taking place nowadays in Palestine- almost a quarter million killed & injured in eleven months  , with a complacency  from the majority of the Western ruling powers, under the pretence of the Sovereign Right of a state who never declared their borders yet, to defend the self, against not only the rulings of the highest courts of the world -the ICC & ICJ-  but the millions of protesting people -who march the streets in eleven months on a weekly basis in the four corners of the world- to stop the genocide- but, unfortunately, without success yet.

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