Why this word is great
NECROPOLITICS — [Noun] The relationship between sovereignty and power over life and death, particularly how political power is exercised through control over mortality. From necro- (Greek νεκρός, nekros, "dead body") + politics (Greek πολιτικά, politiká, "affairs of the cities"), coined by Achille Mbembe. Unlike "biopolitics" (which governs through the management of life) or "thanatopolitics" (which narrows to the administration of dying), necropolitics encompasses both the literal and the living dead—those rendered disposable by borders, wars, or economic exclusion. It is the drone strike’s calculus of collateral damage, the prison industrial complex’s racialized attrition, the bureaucratic indifference that lets the unhoused freeze in winter—not merely the power to kill, but to decide who may be left to die. Sovereignty, in the end, is measured by whose breath it chooses to ignore.