Ecology Achille Mbembe's position on ecology is that the climate crisis stems from the sense of superiority that humans feel towards other species. He argues that this belief was not part of pre-colonial African traditions and that we should look more closely at African archives to find solutions.
The Question of Palestine & Late Modern Colonial Occupation In his forward “On Palestine” to a book written by African scholars comparing
Apartheid South Africa to Israel, Mbembe stated that the Israeli system “is far more lethal. It looks like high-tech Jim Crow-cum-apartheid.” He concludes that the “occupation of Palestine is the biggest moral scandal of our times, one of the most dehumanizing ordeals of the century we have just entered, and biggest act of cowardice of the last half-century.” In
Necropolitics, Mbembe notes that the "colonial occupation of Palestine" represents the "most accomplished form of
necropower."
Academic boycott Mbembe is one of many thousands of academics across the world, who has supported the
Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. In 2010 and 2015, Mbembe signed petitions endorsing the
academic boycott of Israel, including one calling for the
University of Johannesburg to sever ties with
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. In 2018, he was involved in the academic boycott of an Israeli professor, Shifra Sagy. Sagy, a psychology professor at
Ben-Gurion University, was eventually disinvited from a conference at
Stellenbosch University in South Africa after a boycott led by Mbembe and his colleague and wife
Sarah Nuttall.
Cancellation of Ruhrtriennale address In May 2019 the
German Parliament passed a resolution branding the
BDS movement
antisemitic. In addition all
German states were advised to deny public funding for events or people supportive of that movement. In early 2020,
Felix Klein, called for the cancellation of a keynote address by Mbembe scheduled to be delivered on 14 August that summer at the
Ruhrtriennale. He claimed Mbembe had "relativised the Holocaust and denied Israel's right to exist". The invitation was withdrawn, and the festival itself was cancelled due to the
COVID-19 pandemic. This charge was based on Mbembe's comparison between racial separation practices in the South African Apartheid State and Israel's current practices. Mbembe was supported by groups of Israeli and Jewish academics, including some prominent German Holocaust scholars. Other critics argued that Germany was reiterating its former colonial discourses. Concerns were raised over what some argued was a "
weaponization of antisemitism". Following the controversy surrounding Mbembe's attendance at the Ruhrtriennale, more than 400 scholars, including
Nadia Abu El-Haj,
Judith Butler,
Etienne Balibar,
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and
Wendy Brown signed a pledge “opposing ideological or political interference and litmus tests in Germany.” == Private life ==