2024/09/01 by Charles Amo-Agyemang
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Foucault, Power, and Ethics #Political Theology and Sovereignty #Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought
paper · doi:10.3167/th.2024.7118003
openalex publication_date 2024/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Abstract This article is heavily inspired by Michel Foucault's lectures on biopolitical power over life as a starting point for thinking about contemporary global response to COVID-19. The article examines how the government of Ghana deployed biopolitical interventions in response to the pandemic. COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the biopolitics of the current moment, demonstrating the levels of intrusiveness that state power structures have on biological life of the population. The article theorises that the government of Ghana's response to the pandemic indicates that the biopolitical critique of the extension of regulatory governance of life has become blurred in our contemporary times. In conclusion, the article investigates the biopolitics of the pandemic governance from the perspective of conceptualising a ‘beyond’ of such biopolitics, arguing that a critique of existing biopolitics needs to account for its embeddedness in the affirmative modes of biopolitics.