Mbembe interprets Africa not as a defined, isolated place but as a strange relation between itself and the rest of the world which plays out simultaneously on political, psychic, semiotic, and sexual levels. He argues that the colonial powers dictated how some people may live and how some must die. He uses the examples of Palestine and South Africa to show how the power of sovereignty now serves the creation of zones of death where death becomes the ultimate exercise of domination and the primary form of resistance.