Referring to institutionalized racial segregation, discrimination, and violence, the term apartheid (literally meaning apart-hood) was first used in South Africa in 1948. The term is now used more broadly to refer to the brutal repression and systemic killing of entire groups of people.

Michel Foucault used the term biopower to describe how states apply power to manage life. Foucault focused on how institutions and states use population control, data, and reproduction to maintain domination and exert political control. Mbembe extends Foucault’s work on biopower through his theory of necropolitics.

Referring to the practice of domination and control by a country over specific territories, colonialism seeks to exploit resources and Indigenous peoples for profit. Colonizers settle into other spaces and then establish and impose their own culture and systems of government. Mbembe proposes that violence is inherent to colonialism and thus to modern liberal democracy because it grew out of colonialism.