Mexican Necropolitical Governmentality and the Management of Suffering Through Human Rights Technologies

Abstract

This article contends that in Mexico’s necropolitical governmentality (the policies designed for the administration of death), human rights discourses have become a technology used to regulate and normalize the sociopolitical consequences of criminal and state violence, while administrating mass-produced death. Based on the postcolonial notion of necropolitics (specifically, Achille Mbembe’s critique of Michel Foucault’s biopolitics), this article argues that Mexican necropolitical governmentality instrumentalizes human rights discourses through what I refer to as the “apparatus for the management of suffering.” This apparatus is comprised of four strategies based on human rights technologies intended to sustain necropower: the legalization of social demands; an institutional complex that regulates the time and space of subjects for the control of their political agency; the construction of passive and active objects; and the allocation of resources that commodify and reify justice. The article concludes that human rights discourse has become a strategy for the management of death in Mexico.