ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how political incompetence has become a way of letting death happen in domestic and international politics. Incompetence as a practice has long been neglected in the study of political thought. Nonetheless, there is evidence in practice for its relevance as a political concept: from Hurricane Katrina, the invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, the mismanagement of the international financial system and the imposition of extraordinary austerity, to the negligence of refugees from the Middle East coming into Europe, incompetence appears to play a significant role in facilitating everyday death. In essence, incompetence may be assumed to be a necessary component of global structural violence. Departing from observations made by George Orwell on colonial bureaucratic stupidity and Hannah Arendt on banality and thoughtlessness, I explore how incompetence can be understood not just as an individual attribute, as a lack of coherent reasoning or per Kant, a deficiency of judgment, but as a modality of unsuitable governance.
