Achille Mbembe
Achille Mbembe is a Cameroonian philosopher, political theorist, and historian whose work examines how modern power operates through control over life, death, and exposure to harm. He is best known for developing the concept of necropolitics, which extends Michel Foucault’s idea of biopower to describe how institutions and states determine which lives are protected and which are rendered disposable through neglect, abandonment, or sustained violence.
Mbembe’s work is widely used to analyze systems where people are not formally excluded but are instead subjected to conditions that make life precarious, diminished, or unlivable. His theories are particularly relevant to disability justice, education, and social policy because they illuminate how harm can be produced through ordinary administrative decisions, under-resourcing, and the normalisation of suffering rather than through overt acts of force.
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On opposite sides of the same door in BC schools
Families and teachers are describing the same failure from two positions inside it. The system survives by keeping them from recognising each other.
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Try harder, try different
On the pedagogy of “people are not supports,” the research it misreads, and what happens when an idea is transplanted into a starved system.
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Iatrogenic harm and the parent advocate: how school systems produce disability in the families they fail
The body keeps the account even when the institution refuses to. What the school system produced in the parent who spent years trying to hold it accountable is not caregiver burden — a word that belongs to the person carrying it — but iatrogenic harm: specific, dated, attributable, and fully known to the institutions that…
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Counting the wounded: how complaint systems and data bureaucracies erase harm
The same patterns of attrition described in The Ombudsperson and the war of attrition also define how governments manage harm in military and veterans’ systems. Delays in compensation, endless investigations, and deferrals justified as ‘process’ reveal that administrative time itself functions as an instrument of harm. What appears as prudence operates as quiet abandonment—an institutional strategy that…