by Ghulam Mohammad Khan
This is the core logic of necropolitics. The poorest communities suffer the most, their deaths framed as necessary sacrifices for national honour. In such a system, power is accountable only to itself.
We live in an era marked by extraordinary technological advancement and scientific discovery, yet these developments unfold alongside a persistent and disquieting reality: the enduring presence of political violence. This contradiction defines our time. While human innovation promises existential progress, extending from genetic research to space exploration, it has not succeeded in eradicating, or even meaningfully reducing, the systematic brutality that continues to afflict societies.
The most pervasive and consequential form of this violence is political in nature. It operates not as a secondary effect but as a core component of political function. History and political theory converge on a central fact: politics is the pursuit and maintenance of power, and violence, in its most structured and deliberate forms, remains one of its most dependable tools. From the concentration of force that Max Weber identified as the essence of the state, to the violent consolidation and expansion of empires, political ascendancy has consistently relied on coercive capability. Historical records demonstrate that those who achieve and retain political dominance are typically those with the most refined capacity for deploying organised violence.
The emergence of electronic and computer technology, particularly the internet and the rapid proliferation of social media, has transformed the political economy surrounding the visibility of violence. Although governments and corporate entities exercise considerable influence over digital infrastructure through censorship, filtering, and algorithmic content regulation, the design of networked communication itself disrupts traditional monopolies over perception.
Michel Foucault’s reading of the Panopticon reveals how modern democracies shifted the enactment of violence from the visible spectacle of punishment to the hidden mechanisms of discipline within prisons, mental institutions, and administrative systems. This transformation concealed but did not remove systemic force. In the digital era, however, a reverse movement has occurred. There has been a return of the spectacle. Citizen journalism, viral footage, and decentralised media platforms have pierced this veil, disseminating images of police brutality, military crackdowns, and atrocities in conflict zones with unprecedented immediacy and reach.
This visibility, however, brings new complications. Authoritarian governments have exploited the same technologies to construct elaborate systems of surveillance, digital panopticons tailored to modern control and have simultaneously used disinformation to distort and obscure reality. The internet has become a space of continuous contestation, where perception is shaped by simultaneous forces of revelation and concealment. Although digital tools are heavily policed, they remain instrumental in making certain kinds of violence, particularly graphic or suppressed forms, visible, thereby connecting otherwise marginalised experiences to a broader public consciousness.
In contemporary global politics, violence evolves in disturbing directions. It becomes increasingly covert in execution, through drone warfare, clandestine operations, and cyberattacks, while its justifications grow opaque. Hegemonic powers, most notably the United States, deploy what Achille Mbembe has described as a “necropolitical calculus,” rationalising systemic violence as essential to preserving “order” or “stability.” These actions are frequently legitimised using the language of international law, global institutions, and human rights, creating a rhetorical shield around deeply coercive practice.
This same power structure works to control the critical domains of the twenty-first century, including digital infrastructure (as seen in NSA surveillance initiatives such as PRISM), advanced technologies (through sanctions and export regulations), and global trade frameworks (which favour specific geopolitical interests). The aim is not only to project strength but to cultivate the impression that such violence is indispensable. Realist political theory maintains that a dominant power is necessary to prevent large-scale conflict, a notion encapsulated in the idea of a “Pax Americana.” Yet empirical evidence suggests a more troubling reality. The United States, the principal architect of the post-1945 liberal international system (Ikenberry, 2001), has emerged as its most prolific agent of organised violence.
Since 2001, military operations led by the United States have caused over 929,000 direct war-related deaths and displaced tens of millions, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University. This violence is also deeply racialised and imperial. Within the United States, Black Americans are nearly three times more likely to be killed by police than white Americans (Mapping Police Violence, 2023), a statistic that reflects the long-standing legacy of state violence. Internationally, military interventions disproportionately affect countries in the Global South, suggesting that the so-called peace enforced by liberal hegemony often masks the mechanisms of imperial control. This contradiction exposes the brutality that lies beneath the surface of idealistic narratives about global order and humanitarian intervention.
The Economics of Destruction
Contemporary international politics is increasingly shaped by a grim paradox. Humanity commands unprecedented technological sophistication, yet this progress is being directed towards ever more efficient forms of warfare. Global military expenditure reached $2.718 trillion in 2024, according to SIPRI, marking a 9.4 per cent year-on-year increase. This is the steepest rise in decades. Such expenditure sustains not only destruction but a deeply embedded political economy in which prosperity is closely tied to the machinery of war.
The global arms trade, a complex network of state-sanctioned sales and illegal transfers, is dominated by the United States, which holds a 40 per cent market share, followed by Russia, France, China, and Germany. Countries like Saudi Arabia allocate more than 8 per cent of their GDP to defence. Power is still measured by destructive capacity, whether in megatons, missile range, or the scale of autonomous drone systems. Traditional ground warfare, marked by slower and more localised violence, has been supplanted by precision strikes, hypersonic missiles, and remote operations. These tools enable rapid, large-scale devastation, often far removed from the battlefield.
The civilian cost is staggering. Modern conflicts see up to 90 per cent of casualties among non-combatants, according to UN estimates. The irony is stark. Those states that promote themselves as civilised, technologically advanced, and committed to democratic norms are frequently those most active in deploying such violence. Their expertise lies in transforming destruction into narratives of necessity and self-defence, while mastering strategies of deflection: blaming the powerless, invoking the euphemism of “collateral damage,” and using diplomatic influence to escape scrutiny under the very frameworks they helped establish. Violence has become faster, more lethal, and increasingly profitable, but the mechanisms of moral evasion remain unchanged.
The Collapse of Norms
We now inhabit a world marked by blatant contempt for international law and humanitarian principles. This impunity thrives within a rigid global hierarchy. The five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom, alongside Israel, Germany, and Canada, maintain a monopoly over nuclear weaponry. These states reserve for themselves the right to possess the most destructive arms ever created, while enforcing strict non-proliferation norms on others, such as Iran and North Korea.
This contradiction exposes the inequality built into the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, ratified by 189 states, yet unable to compel disarmament among the original nuclear powers. In practice, power grants permission for acts of violence that erase sovereignty. One dominant state can bring another close to destruction. Since October 2023, over 56,700 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, the majority of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Such actions proceed with little consequence, aided by the silence or procedural inaction of the Security Council, where the United States has used its veto more than 40 times on resolutions concerning Israel and Palestine since 1972.
The normalisation of mass death is visible elsewhere. The war between Russia and Ukraine has led to over 500,000 military casualties and the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, according to UN estimates. These losses now form a permanent backdrop to geopolitical discourse. Simultaneously, missile and drone exchanges between states like Israel and Iran, causing billions in damage, function as economic triggers. Following one such attack by Iran, shares in Lockheed Martin rose by 4.3 per cent. In Africa, external actors sustain proxy wars. The Wagner Group operates in Mali and the Sahel, while other powers intervene in Sudan and Darfur. These engagements portray one faction as a threat to justify intervention, while treating the resulting human suffering as an acceptable cost within their strategic calculations.
This is the height of necropolitical rule. The most powerful states operate in a permanent state of exception, suspending the rules they publicly champion. International law becomes an instrument of convenience, while mass violence is absorbed into routine policy.
Nationalism and Necropolitics
Nationalism, often celebrated as a cohesive force, now serves as the chief ideological driver of necropolitical mobilisation. It legitimises extreme violence in the name of collective identity and transforms citizens into tools of state authority. Democratic principles are eroded. Concepts such as sovereignty, liberty, and justice are emptied of substance and replaced by a form of ballistic sovereignty, where territorial claims and political authority are measured not by democratic consent or legal frameworks but by the destructive power of weaponry.
The consequences are devastating. During the 2019 Balakot crisis and subsequent border clashes between India and Pakistan, over 50 civilians were killed and more than 300 were injured, according to the ICRC. Thousands were displaced. In Operation Sindoor, launched after the Pahalgam terror incident, dozens of civilians lost their lives on both sides of the Line of Control. Social media circulated footage of homes reduced to rubble, families torn apart, survivors crying out amid wreckage. These scenes illustrate the harsh cost of nationalist aggression. Civilian lives become expendable in pursuit of symbolic victories.
This is the core logic of necropolitics. The poorest communities suffer the most, their deaths framed as necessary sacrifices for national honour. In such a system, power is accountable only to itself. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reflects this dynamic. Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed, and damage to infrastructure exceeds $170 billion. Yet, due to Russia’s nuclear status, direct military intervention by rival powers has remained limited to cautious containment.
At the same time, those same states demonstrate remarkable ideological flexibility. Countries condemning Russian aggression in Europe actively support Israeli military campaigns in Gaza. The United States alone authorised $3.8 billion in annual military aid to Israel before 2023, along with additional emergency funding. Much of this support has been used in operations that the International Court of Justice has deemed plausibly genocidal. The backing is not symbolic. It is concrete, financial, and deadly. This alignment exposes the fragility of the so-called rules-based order, which collapses when allies are the perpetrators.
A Descent into Annihilation
This widening collapse of moral order, where violence is rewarded and power equated with impunity, is steering the world towards catastrophe. Military spending rose to $2.718 trillion in 2024, according to SIPRI. Far from promoting deterrence, this growth reflects an arms race that is accelerating without pause.
New technologies make the threat more severe. AI-controlled swarms, hypersonic missiles, and autonomous weapon systems reduce the scope for human oversight. Future conflicts are likely to be more violent, less predictable, and increasingly divorced from moral constraint.
The danger is no longer theoretical. Ethnically targeted biological weapons represent a disturbing embodiment of thanatopolitics. Cyber warfare can now disable essential infrastructure, from hospitals to financial systems. Algorithm-driven disinformation campaigns undermine the possibility of shared truth, fragmenting public discourse.
This trajectory pushes beyond familiar horrors. It moves toward an era in which civilizational collapse becomes a tangible risk. Ballistic sovereignty and necropolitical rule have supplanted law and ethics. The international community remains largely silent. Allies remain complicit. Military technology expands relentlessly. These forces, unchecked, create a machinery of destruction. Its momentum continues to build, driven by a collective refusal to confront the architecture of impunity that sustains it.
(Born and raised in Sonawari (Bandipora) on the shores of Wullar Lake, the author is an Assistant Professor at HKM Degree College. Ideas are personal.)
