The novel coronavirus pandemic that was triggered in China in December 2019 has dealt a significant global shock to many vulnerable people comparable to that of the Great Depression of the 1930s. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak of COVID-19 as a pandemic on 11 March 2020 (WHO 2020). Just four months after Chinese public health officials identified the genome of the virus, there had been millions of cases of COVID-19 confirmed globally, and hundreds of thousands had tragically died (Ajana 2021; Ozili 2022; WHO 2020). As the virus spread globally, many countries took action to limit the spread through social isolation, social distancing policies and self-quarantine among other measures to restrict the mobility of people (Li et al. 2020; Maier and Brockmann 2020; WHO 2020b).
Ghana did not escape the monumental life-changing disruptions and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic impact in Ghana was evident as early as March 2020 after the first COVID-19 case was diagnosed in late January (Amoah 2020; Dzigbede and Pathak 2020). COVID-19, as of the time of this writing in 2024, has taken more than 1,462 lives since it struck Ghana in January 2020 (Ghana Health Service 2023). The government of Ghana forged a raft of policy responses to contain the spread of the virus which entailed: painful lockdown restrictions in the Greater Accra metropolitan area and the Greater Kumasi metropolitan area, social distancing measures, ubiquitous surveillance, rapid testing and contact tracing, self-quarantine measures, state of emergency measures as well as aggressive mass education and public health information campaigns to create the necessary awareness in Ghana (Asante and Mills 2020; Gyasi 2020; Presidential Address 2021; World Health Organization 2020b).
There has been a true explosion of critical scholarly contributions aimed at making sense of the political responses to the COVID-19 pandemic (Agamben 2020a; Gorby 2023; Nassehi 2020; Reckwitz 2020; Ricco 2020; Schubert 2022). Indeed, there is explicit biopolitical implications in governing populations in the present situation. Existing scholarly studies on the politics of COVID-19 in Ghana have addressed among other things: the managerial and decision-making effectiveness, preparedness and responses, and crisis management of the government of Ghana (Abor and Abor 2020; Amoah 2020; Armah-Attoh et al. 2020; Asante and Mills 2020; Dauda and Imoro 2022; Dzigbede and Pathak 2020; Gyasi 2020; Morgan 2020). These works are rich and important but have tended to neglect the explicit and distinctive biopolitical aspects of pandemic governance, and the possibility of conceiving of a ‘beyond’ of biopolitics towards a more affirmative mode of politics.
This article is primarily a theoretical study of the biopolitics of COVID-19 (with Ghana as case study), as well as an attempt to develop an affirmative biopolitics that try to go ‘beyond’ the ‘thanatopolitical’ power of biopolitics. Given the fact that going ‘beyond’ Foucault in search of affirmative biopolitics is at the heart of this article, it investigates questions such as the following: How adequate or problematic is it to examine the government of Ghana's response to the politics of COVID-19 through a Foucauldian biopolitical governmentality? How do we affirm a life ‘beyond’ biopolitics? And how does the Ghanaian case specifically open possibilities for reimagining the politics of life? By addressing such questions, this article seeks to be more than simply give an account of the theoretical basis of biopolitics, but rather a reconstruction of biopolitics analytics that can be used to develop critical understanding of the present.
The article makes a valuable contribution to ongoing scholarly discussions about pandemic governance and biopolitical frameworks. It potentially contributes to the existing scholarly debates on biopolitical theorisation and critique, and on the relevance of Ghana as a case study in the context of responses to the pandemic by most governments across the world. Overall, the article makes very productive use of Foucault's work on biopolitics and the engagement with a non-Western context.
The discussion is most strongly informed by the choice of Ghana as a case study to analyse the government's reactions to the politics of COVID-19 as an illustration of the contemporary usage of biopolitics. The choice of Ghana is that it demonstrated a success story in combatting the pandemic (Abor and Abor 2020; Morgan 2020; WHO 2021). Clearly, the enviable result is the minimal loss of lives and spread of the virus compared to some other countries (Asante and Mills 2020; Gyasi 2020), where there were also effective responses to the pandemic. Ghana was more successful and effective in containing COVID-19, compared with other countries that implemented very similar mechanisms, due to its bottom-up responses. The bottom-up responses to COVID-19 in the Ghanaian context were characterised by trust, efficient public communication and public compliance. The pandemic presented significant challenges to existing approaches to biopolitics particularly in the Ghanaian case. The pandemic revealed limitations of the Ghanaian state's capacity to enforce biopolitical measures due to pre-existing weaknesses in an unproductive insurance-centred approach to public health resulting in human resource shortfalls in public health delivery, marginalisation of patients and a decay in public healthcare infrastructure, cultural practices and beliefs among others. These challenges necessitate a more affirmative approach to biopolitics which involves collective solidarity, mutual cooperation, care, compassion and empathy to one another to live and survive in times of crisis.
Foucauldian Biopolitics and the COVID-19 Pandemic
If there is any one single theme that has resonated with the politics of COVID-19 pandemic more than all others, it is biopolitics. The politics of the pandemic laid bare the biopolitics of the current moment. The pandemic demonstrated the levels of intrusiveness that state power structures have on human life. Foucault's lectures on biopolitics and population control in 1978 and 1979, delivered at the Collège de France, have become a key concept in critical discourses of governance in the last two decades (Foucault 2010a). Foucault conceives biopolitics within the broader framework of development since the seventeenth century (Foucault 2010a). One gets a much better account of the birth of biopolitics in the translation of Foucault's 1975 and 1976 lecture published posthumously under the title Society Must be Defended (Foucault 2003a), much of which found its way into the introductory volume of the History of Sexuality Vol. 1, published in the 1970s (Foucault 1990).
Foucauldian analysis of biopolitics has engendered a body of literature in legal studies, international relations theory, demography, history of medicine, biology, as well as in many other emerging disciplines (Chandler 2020; Mills 2017; Ojakangas 2016). Following Foucault, biopolitics refers to a modern type of government that regulates populations through techniques of power that take ‘life itself’ as their object and enhance its productive capacity (Foucault 1980). Foucault deployed the concept of biopolitics to look at the ways in which the biological life of human beings became politicised and utilised from the eighteenth century to its present (Foucault 2007).
Foucault develops the idea of biopolitics as a set of techniques and forms of knowledge that inadvertently constituted the population as a political problem: a vital phenomenon which included the management of populations health through statistical, population-level regulations such as the management of things like hygiene, birth and mortality rates or average life expectancy (Foucault 2010a). Biopolitics entails optimising the population's vitality, usually a technology of biopower, which takes hold of biological life of the human species, contrary to disciplinary control of individual bodies and subjects. Disciplinary control of individual bodies and subjects manifests itself in the form of prohibition or repression within contemporary Western societies (Foucault 1990). In the biopolitical administration of populations, power confronts populations as political, scientific, biological and epidemiological problems that must be managed en masse rather than rely only on disciplining specific individual bodies (Foucault 2004, 2007; Mills 2017).
Foucault (1977) claimed that what fundamentally characterises biopolitical life processes of a population is the creation of a healthy and productive subject to increase the power, prosperity and happiness of the state and its population. In this way, the biopolitical value of life is the maximal material well-being of the population. Thus, biopolitics was for Foucault (2010b) a regime of political power that operates to foster or disallow life: a productive technique of power. Foucault highlights the fact that biopolitics rather than being imposed by totalitarian systems of coercion in most part, fundamentally developed as a complex regime of power/knowledge in Western societies.
Biopolitics is Foucault's further development of the analysis of modern governmentality. Biopolitics has historically developed in tandem with liberal forms of governmentality which manifests in self-regulation (Foucault 2010a). According to Foucault, biopolitics and governmental rationality of liberalism are intricately interwoven and compatible in that they both rely on expert power (Foucault 2010a). Liberal governmentality, Foucault notes, emphasises the limitation of government at the expense of the sovereign's right to death or life of its nationals (Foucault 2010a). This Foucault notes paved the way for modern biopolitical society of experts and managers of life. Here, Foucault argues that the modern state has historically always developed its biopolitical techniques and regulations in all spheres of society. The biopolitical critique of governance as the control and manipulation of life, as an object of power, Foucault (2010a) notes, has primarily been a technique on the nature of modern politics.
Although biopolitics is a concept most closely associated with the work of the French thinker Michel Foucault, various critical scholars in the last two decades have drawn and expanded on the work by Michel Foucault. Giorgio Agamben (1998), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000), Roberto Esposito (2008) and Thomas Lemke (2019) have carried out investigations into biopolitics in exploring and analysing regimes of government and apparatuses in contemporary societies. Giorgio Agamben, who is perhaps the most renown of contemporary theorists of biopolitics, conceptualises biopolitics as ‘thanatopolitics’ or a politics of death, while Roberto Esposito and Antonio Negri argue for fostering a positive form of biopolitics. Foucault's philosophical point of view has also been explored in the works of Nikolas Rose (2007) within the realm of governmental technologies during the twentieth century.
The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked a surge of scholarly interest in the relationship between Foucauldian-inspired understandings of biopolitics and its relation to health. These scholarly works examine how power operates through the regulation of bodies and populations. Mark Kelly (2023), for example, discusses the role of capitalism for understanding how biopolitics thrived during the pandemic around the world, while David Chandler (2020) and Daniele Lorenzini (2021) extended the Foucauldian biopolitical framework to understand state responses to the global pandemic. Similarly, Valentina Antonio (2023) has deployed Foucault's theoretical angles as an entry point for gaining insights into the political rationale of administrating and protecting public health during the pandemic. Jorge Vélez Vega and Ricardo Noguera-Solano (2023) turn to Foucault to understand biopolitical measures enacted by states to intervene, regulate and manage their populations. These contributions provide nuanced insights in understanding biological health and pandemic population management (Gjerde 2024: 56).
The Biopolitics of Pandemic Governance in Ghana
Biopolitical interventions in the biological life of populations emerged as a key factor in people's relation to the state as the pandemic began to cast its long shadow across the globe (Højme 2022; Nancy 2021; Serhan 2020). The pandemic presents an opportunity to critique and problematise various interventions often associated with Foucault's notion of biopolitical governmentality. This section is an empirical discussion of the government of Ghana's responses to the pandemic. The Foucauldian approach brings into a sharp relief Ghana's pandemic governance and intervention to keep as many Ghanaians alive as possible. The government of Ghana acted swiftly and decisively to supress and mitigate the spread of the virus (GOG 2020a). This article confines itself to the discussion of the following biopolitical interventions during the pandemic: lockdown measures, mass vaccination, self-quarantine measures, social distancing practices, monitoring, testing, tracing, case management and implementation of state emergency powers.
State Emergency Measures
Following the WHO declaration of COVID-19 as a public health emergency, the government of Ghana implemented emergency measures to protect the health of the population just like other states had done (Amoah 2020; Frimpong 2020). Ghana's first major biopolitical intervention during the pandemic was the declaration of state of emergency on 11 March 2020 (GOG 2020a). The declaration of a state of emergency allowed the government of Ghana to rule by exceptional measures to address an urgent threat to social order (Agamben 2020b; Foucault 2003a; Hannah 2012; Lemke 2019). Emergency measures as Agamben (2021) argues, offered the ideal pretext for broadening exceptional measures beyond any limitation to slow the spread of the virus.
The government of Ghana, as part of its emergency powers in response to the pandemic, passed four executive instruments (E.I.) on 21 March 2020, to offer legal backing to the directives issued in respect to the COVID-19 containment and management strategy (GOG 2020b). The extra-legal sphere in terms of establishing a state of emergency to face the contagion facilitated mechanisms of power – especially disciplinary powers to limit individual freedoms (Agamben 2020a; Lührmann and Rooney 2020), and in so doing, were brought under the regime of governmentality. The biopolitical anti-crisis management interventions were used to persuade the Ghanaian people to sacrifice personal liberties for the sake of public safety. The biopolitical Ghanaian state constructed spaces by declaring individuals who did not comply or conform to the pandemic protocols as persona non grata. Biopolitical interventions aim to secure the biological existence of a population and do so by correcting anti-social behaviour (Agamben, G. 2021; Malm 2020; Moisio 2020). Agamben (1998) discusses this in relation to the abandonment of subjects to a condition of bare life, stripping them of their political rights.
The biopolitical crisis of the pandemic forced the government of Ghana to ban gatherings and impose a curfew. A ban on gatherings and a curfew were constructed as a biopolitical danger, or a ‘caricature’ of biopolitical securitisation as described by Bruno Latour (2020). Schools and universities were closed to reduce the risk of infection and the use of alternatives such as online education, remote learning through public service broadcast, and television schooling were introduced (Asante and Mills 2020; Dauda and Imoro 2022).
Ghanaian citizens were caught between the liberal biopolitics of sovereign power and the disciplinary mechanisms exerted by the exceptional powers of the government (Sandset and Villadsen 2023: 632; Triantafillou 2022). In The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, Foucault (1990) distinguished between the right of the sovereign power to kill and the power to live and develop life which was generally rooted in law (Foucault 1990; Lemke 2019). The change from the former to the latter greatly impacted how law functions. Whereas the law had previously been punitive, it now became disciplinary. The law went from punishing wrongdoers to seeking to correct individuals’ divergent behaviours to enforce dominant social norms (Gjerde 2024). The pandemic brought into sharp relief the relevance of sovereign power through a declaration of a state of emergency to restrict individuals’ life and freedoms. Emergency measures and restrictions made the freedom of assembly and public gathering dangerous to the well-being of the population (Luscombe and McClelland 2020).
The imposition of state of emergency measures made the public itself responsible for mitigating the risk of COVID-19 infection to safeguard lives (Gjerde 2024; Nassehi 2020; Reckwitz 2020). This biopolitical intervention widened the government of Ghana's power base by which the lives of Ghanaians were governed at a distance. Governing at a distance increasingly considers the individual as an autonomous subject who self-monitors and exercises their agency to mitigate external risks. The pandemic effectively exposed the authoritarian implications on the part of democracies, and thus posed a serious challenge to the theoretical insights of Foucault. As Sotiris (2020), for example, has argued, the pandemic justified and legitimised limitless emergency measures to control the population than were warranted by the health crisis. These limitless emergency measures increasingly blurred the lines between democracy and totalitarianism, a kind of tension and contradiction within democratic legitimation which became apparent during the global pandemic (Gjerde 2024).
There was heightened control over free expression under the guise of fighting ‘misinformation’ about the virus. Freedom of expression became a biopolitical affair of the government of Ghana. Emergency responses to the pandemic gave the Ghanaian state greater justification to deploy even more extensive contact tracing systems, including the use of smartphone location data to trace contact and track the whereabouts of citizens who may have been exposed to the virus. The use of smartphone location data to trace contact and track the whereabouts of citizens who may have been exposed to the virus align with biopolitical concerns about managing populations for public health purposes. These authoritarian tendencies that a few years ago would have seemed intrusive and unacceptable became the new normal during the pandemic. In as much as a public health emergency requires extraordinary measures, the risks for political abuse of these new measures are significant, particularly if such responses do not meet the basic tests of necessity, transparency and proportionality.
Mass Vaccination
Immunity through vaccination emerged as one of the most highly debated topics during the pandemic (Ajana 2021; Nelson 2020; Sandset and Villadsen 2023). Vaccination as a calculating logic became a tool for managing public health and achieving a level of control over the spread of the pandemic (Ajana 2021; Yu 2021). On 24 February 2021 Ghana became the first country in the world to receive vaccines from the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation's (GAVI) COVAX (COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access) facility, a COVID-19 vaccine drive initiative supported by the WHO and UNICEF for African and other less developed countries (G 2020a; WHO 2022). The government of Ghana performed a crucial role in this direction by working with the Ministry of Health, Ghana Health Services and Ministry of Information to procure COVID-19 vaccines from the COVAX facility to protect the population (GOG 2020a). The government of Ghana's relentless efforts led to the receipt of some 968,000 Oxford-AstraZeneca doses as part of an initial batch from COVAX on 24 February 2021(GOG 2020a).
The President of Ghana, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, in May 2023, committed twenty-five million dollars ($25 million) to develop domestic vaccine production capability (GIZ 2024; Ministry of Health 2023). Domestic vaccine production would facilitate the capacity of the domestic pharmaceutical industry to fill, finish and package mRNA COVID-19 and other vaccines as a first step towards vaccine production by the year 2031(Ministry of Health 2023). To this end, the government commissioned the National Vaccine Institute to coordinate, oversee research and facilitate the development and manufacture of domestic vaccine production in the short, medium and long-term phases (GIZ 2024; Ministry of Health 2023). As of 31 December 2023, as many as 28,515,854 individuals from a population of 30 million had been vaccinated (GIZ 2024; Ministry of Health 2023).
Immunity through vaccination, Foucault argues (2007), is an important biopolitical technique and was mentioned in his discussion of smallpox in the age of liberalism. In the view of Roberto Esposito, immunisation is a central paradigm of biopolitics (2008). Immunity became the bridge between biological life and political life in light of the global pandemic. Immunity as a biological concept is rooted in everyday life and crucial to one's survival, as demonstrated by the responses to the global pandemic (Owen 2020). The growing number of survivors during the pandemic would constitute a healthy process of immunisation in Foucault's sense. Contemporary theorisations of biopolitics suggest that the government of Ghana's vaccination response to the COVID-19 problematic was to ensure a valorisation of life for its citizens. It is worth noting that reasonable vaccination coverages were achieved in the hotspots of infections, particularly in the urban areas of Greater Accra and Greater Kumasi.
Inoculation and vaccination were typical disciplinary powers developed in the seventeenth century (analysed in Discipline and Punish [Foucault 1977] and in Security, Territory, Population [Foucault 2007]). The pandemic demonstrated the intrusiveness of even democratic regulation in which human bodies became sites of subject of governance in contemporary political systems as manifested by vaccination campaigns over bodily autonomy. However, vaccine hesitancy and vaccine refusal due to misinformation, religious beliefs or general mistrust of authority highlights the limitations of biopolitical approaches in addressing global health issues. Unequal access to vaccines in many parts of Ghana challenge traditional biopolitical rationalities that emphasise global cooperation for public health.
Social Distancing Practices
Governments across the globe enacted stay-at-home and social distancing regulations to mitigate the spread of the virus (Barnett-Howell and Mobarak 2020; Díez et al. 2020). Social distancing practices mandated individuals to stay at home and refrain from interacting with large groups of people or limit interactions to small groups (Fitzgerald 2020; Kim and Loayza 2020; Mudde 2020; Pagés et al. 2020). Social distancing practices suggest that people are the vectors for the spread of the virus. To this end, schools, stores, temples, bars and religious activities were closed to reduce the risk of infection, leading to the suspension of freedom of assembly (Abor and Abor 2020; Armah-Attoh et al. 2020).
Social distancing practices forced the government of Ghana to undertake various disciplinary measures to discipline the entire Ghanaian population (Cot 2020; Foucault 1977). To make Ghanaians more disciplined and controlled, fines were imposed on those who did not comply with social distancing practices (Asante and Mills 2020; Gyasi 2020). Social distancing as a disciplinary form of rule generated new opportunities for increased surveillance technologies and control (Arminjon and Marion Veyron 2021). These repressive practices were enabled by biopolitics that placed Ghanaians in the domain of what Foucault (1977) conceived as population management techniques and were focused (primarily, but not exclusively) to better condition the living forces. Mandatory stay-at-home orders became a biopolitical technique for segregating and confining Ghanaians. It also constituted a form of governmentality through which the government of Ghana sought to influence the behaviour of Ghanaians from a distance. In fact, it shifted the responsibility for the care of Ghanaian populations away from the state and onto the self-care practices (Foucault 2003) of Ghanaian citizens.
Other biopolitically motivated prescriptions required Ghanaians to refrain from shaking hands, wearing masks whenever they left their homes, and spraying their hands with disinfectant. All these unprecedented public health measures were woven into biopower as Ghanaians were increasingly asked to take responsibility for making life and death decisions. Taking responsibility for making life and death decisions as a feature of biopolitics were incorporated into processes of subjectivation (Beckett 2020; Serhan 2020; Zarka 2020). In this sense, we fall into the trap that Foucault warned us about: physical biopolitical restrictions imposed by the government are explicitly connected to modern biopower, and that is how our automatic behaviours regarding health and death are formed, shaped and reshaped (Foucault 2003). Through the lens of biopolitics, we can see that social distancing and associated stringent hygiene measures acquire their central importance from the fact that the ongoing circulation of human bodies is simultaneously dangerous and necessary.
The Practice of ‘Self-Quarantine’
The decision to impose self-quarantine – in other words, to isolate oneself – became the accepted norm of biopolitical technique during the pandemic. The question of self-quarantine (isolation) is significant as it frames the government of Ghana's responses to the pandemic governance and their resultant emphasis on the legitimate powers of governments. The biopolitical self-quarantine and isolation concentrates on epidemiological risk and the notion of the subject (citizen) as self-surveillant. The practice of self-quarantine and isolation under a state of exception are disciplinary power mechanisms and liberal-governmental logic that subjugate individuals, as aptly described by Foucault (1990). The disciplinary confinement and self-quarantine (isolation) were key calculative instrument of the government of Ghana's response to minimise the spread of the virus.
Self-quarantine and isolation rely heavily on liberal preservation and disciplinary limitation of freedoms. The liberal art of governing more generally relies centrally on the cultivation of fear and anxiety in combination with instrumental reason. This gives us one way by which we might get the sense of the heightened disciplinary confinement and mass surveillance in the biopolitics of pandemic governance. Quarantine and self-isolation practices, typical in Ghana, put in place the foreground-background structure at the heart of disciplinary power. The quarantine and self-isolation practices occasioned a dramatic reduction in public activity as well as the suppression of recreational and unauthorised groupings. It is important to point out that the imposition of fines, jail time and other punishments against unauthorised groupings (‘hanging out’ in public space or people getting together for ‘corona parties’) positioned them as dangerous outsiders. Unauthorised groupings posed an autoimmune problem to be combated with more intrusion and the production of disciplinary powers on citizens. As such and in pursuit of immunity, self-quarantine and isolation were enforced so that the rest of the population could be supposedly cared for.
Self-quarantine and isolation exemplify Foucault's examination of how power operates through the regulation of human bodies and populations (Foucault 2003). From a Foucauldian perspective, self-quarantine (isolation) is the drive for self-monitoring: it is based on the belief that one is under constant scrutiny, and thus becomes a driving force in the creation of modern subjectivity (Foucault 2010a). The COVID-19 pandemic made individuals bodies the selling point of deep subjection where individuals were expected to regulate their own interactions to prevent the spread of the virus. But what about an ecological view where self-isolation may slow down the rate of the circulation of viruses? In saying this, however, one needs to be very clear as to whether viruses have agency (are viruses allowed to speak?) in this narrative or are they just an excuse for power to become more gloomy, intrusive and pervasive? Yes, to some extent every issue of self-quarantine (isolation) is a Foucauldian issue. Self-quarantine (isolation) has been present for decades; however, the COVID-19 moment offered an opportunity to make these biopolitical practices visible, intelligible, and concrete to a much wider portion of the population (Serhan 2020). The breaking of COVID-19 self-quarantine and isolation rules was made a finable offence by most governments across the world. The government of Ghana imposed fines on people who did not follow the code of conduct to self-quarantine and isolate (Assiseh 2020). Nevertheless, there were people who did not follow the code of conduct imposed by the government to fight the pandemic due to religious beliefs, preferences or priorities. The question of self-quarantine (isolation) reinforces the limitations of biopolitical control that rely solely on state power.
Lockdown Restrictions
The government of Ghana reacted quickly to the domestic appearance of the infection (GOG 2020b). On 15 March 2020 the government imposed a partial lockdown in a televised speech. Schools, universities and other non-essential parts of the public sector were shut down. Borders were closed for foreign nationals, effectively ending international travel. Employers were urged to allow their employees to work from home, and people were urged to stay at home and minimise social contact (Asante and Mills 2020). The totalising measure of lockdown was deployed by the government of Ghana to rationalise biopolitical power over life. The government enacted self-governing techniques to make the public more disciplined. To be able to control the public, the government imposed fines on those who broke lockdown rules, supposedly to safeguard citizen's lives. Lockdown rules such as not touching your nose and mouth or rubbing your eyes among others was indicative of how Ghanaians were told to control and discipline themselves. It is here we encounter what Foucault (2010a) calls norms and normalisation. Norms and normalisation provided the impetus for individual Ghanaians to be objectified, categorised and classified. The imposition of strict behavioural and non-compliance fines for the public created self-governable Ghanaians. Lockdown restrictions reflected interventionist biopolitical concern for life such as during the pandemic (Hale et al. 2020).
The pandemic biopolitical governance was an affront to our way of living. In fact, the pandemic exposed the tension within the basic biopolitical optimisation of human life which demands a sea change in human subjectivity. The COVID-19 politics effectively required us to change the way in which we think about our world and ourselves. The subjectivity in the politics of COVID-19 was most poignantly illustrated by the techniques of governance compatible with human life. Enforcement of lockdown rules articulated through an interventionist biopolitical approach restricted and limited freedom of movement and social interactions in favour of safeguarding the health of the population (Gjerde 2024).
Monitoring, Testing, Tracing, Statistical Data Collection and Case Management
The chronic under-resourcing and overall neglect of healthcare services over the past years resulted in delays in the procurement of essential medical equipment and supplies during the pandemic in Ghana (Ministry of Health 2020). Biopolitical institutions such as Noguchi Institute of Medical Research, Kumasi Centre for Collaborative Research, the Trust Hospital Company Ltd and Synlab Ghana were the designated institutions for testing and monitoring COVID-19 (Ministry of Health 2020). These biopolitical institutions created medical surveillance instruments such as COVID-19 tracing apps, more testing, case management and monitoring across the country to contain the pandemic. For Foucault (2010a: 139), medical clinics, hospitals and medical research institutions are core biopolitical institutions which treat humans as statistics – institutions that subject humans to precise controls and comprehensive regulation and control (Foucault 2010a).
The government of Ghana expanded and prepared health facilities for large increases in patient numbers. To this end, the government procured eighty-one million Ghanaian cedis worth of personal protective equipment such as face masks, headcovers, medical scrubs and hospital gowns from domestic garment and textiles manufacturing companies for health workers (GOG 2020a; Ministry of Health 2020). The government protected health workers and doctors, and augmented testing and monitoring capacity to mobilise additional healthcare staff to reduce the spread of the pandemic (Ministry of Health 2020). The ubiquitous surveillance by the Zipline Company, which oversees medical drones in Ghana, and the comprehensive monitoring, diagnosis, statistics and data collection metrices by the Ministry of Health Services are central to governmentality and biopolitics, as they made the Ghanaian society governable at a distance. Monitoring, diagnosis, statistics and data collection metrices offered the biopolitical space through which the government of Ghana managed, governed and interfered in public lives. Biopolitical space Foucault (1991) argues, is effected through interventions and regulatory control – biopolitics of the population.
The distinctively biopolitical intervention and techniques of the pandemic enforced by the government of Ghana was organised around the better extraction of living forces (Foucault 2010a). The COVID-19 pandemic governance and social control strategies, as covered by Foucault, laid bare the biopolitics of the current moment. The biopolitics of the current moment, in the name of optimising and managing the population, blurs the lines between care and control and between norm and exception (Sandset and Villadsen 2023). Medical technologies and strategies for testing, tracing, statistical data collection and case management (Sandset and Villadsen 2023) necessitated the blurring of the boundaries between the human body, the person as the object of regulation and political power during the pandemic. This corresponds with Foucault's (2007) characterisation of the ‘apparatuses of security’ as fundamental processes of self-regulation.
The various raft of policies taken against the spread of the virus in contexts such as in Ghana are characteristic of biopolitical processes and how power over life is articulated and re-mobilised in our historical present. This is not to suggest that all biopolitical power is negative. Foucault himself did not posit power including biopolitical power as inherently negative, but rather as relational and thus always changing as circumstances change. We might choose to accept some of the protocols during the global pandemic even if we would not otherwise, though there are dangers in doing so.
Pandemic Begets Subjectification
Life and politics were effectively mediated in the process of subjectification during the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic was a particular production of subjectivity in relation to biopolitics. The global pandemic pushes the borders of how we can think and create a healthy and productive subject. Foucault's famous lectures (1981–1984), are very helpful here in approaching and making sense of the forms of subjectivation this apparently novel COVID-19 pandemic produced and reproduced (Chandler 2020). This aspect of our subjectivation can clearly be seen in how it is ingrained in the way the virus's impact was increasingly discussed.
There is something new about the biopolitics of the pandemic in so far as it preaches the powerlessness of the human subject. The human is now posed as a threat to the well-being rather than being positioned as an object of care. And this is what we must direct our attention to, a particular historical development, considered broadly, that Foucault alludes to in his ‘technologies of the self’. Foucault's later period (1981–1984), introduced the concept of ‘care of the self’ (‘souci de soi’ in French) as the basis of an ethical relationship with others, and thus with politics (Foucault 2004; Westerink 2020). Foucault in his work on ‘technologies of the self’, sheds a grander light on the continued importance of how people can also invariably choose to be subjects, wherein they take the initiative to have what he calls a ‘relation with oneself’ (Foucault 1997: 297) by transforming, negotiating and fashioning their own identity and relating to themselves as subjects. In this way, Foucault privileges the practices of the self and arts of existence as an ethical self rather than as transcendental claims about subjecthood (Westerink 2020).
Foucault's approach to the analysis of the constitution of subjects – or subject formations – provides the possibility, an escape route and the means of identifying how suitable subjects were produced and constructed during the pandemic. The pandemic prompted the government of Ghana, well-meaning individuals and institutions to adopt new practices like bottom up initiatives of solidarity and self-care practices as an essential condition for the affirmation of life as we faced difficulties. Comprehending biopolitics as a modern regime of power requires that we recognise, fundamentally, the unprecedented scale of the political functioning at work in its development. And crucially, the function of the subject's ability to care for itself in the face of ordeals and crisis, through the careful construction of the process of subjectification. These are practices by which the subject learns to move to the summit of itself, and to see the self by looking down, surveying it and becoming its master from above and taming it and rendering it conducive to its own needs. The Ghanaian population extended responsibility to make decisions about life and death through their own individual choices. The Ghanaian population reconciled their love of life, their desires to live well, to care for life and make life liveable, with an external (or internal) threat. So, there is a shift in the order of biopolitics which has taken place, and, of course, which Foucault has not been able to witness.
Towards a ‘Beyond’ of the Biopolitics of the COVID-19 Pandemic
What does it mean to speak of an affirmative biopolitics given the intertwining of the powers of life and death? Can biopolitics be affirmative? To counterbalance the focus on authoritarian and repressive power in which much biopolitical critique appears to be embedded (Agamben 2020b), recent years have seen attempts to conceptualise a amore affirmative mode of biopolitics (Arminjon and Marion Veyron 2021; Esposito 2021; Renault 2006) which accounts for alternative communal forms of life. Mathieu Arminjon and Marion Veyron (2021) discuss the workings and operations of bio-empowerment as a fundamental reconstitution of the very notions of life and death.
There was a togetherness and co-dependency during the pandemic, and this put affirmative biopolitics at the centre of politics (Esposito 2021). Esposito's analysis pays particular attention to immunising actions within the social community to expel that which is foreign to the body of the community. So, beyond the focus on ‘thanatopolitics’, lies the potential for care, relatedness, collective solidarity, and compassion that emerged during the pandemic (Rþza Taþkale 2022; Tierney 2016). This recasts, reconstitutes and changes the way we think about human life, and exposes the deep limitations of the biopolitical establishment (Hardt and Negri 2000; Rþza Taþkale 2022). The more affirmative mode of biopolitics works to demand communal forms of life and mobilises the techniques and rationalities of vulnerability (Bird and Lynch 2019). The possibility for human empathy, mutual aid and life-affirming acts of solidarity are key aspects of the more affirmative mode of biopolitics of COVID-19.
The Ghanaian case certainly moves beyond biopolitical imaginary towards a more affirmative mode of politics as the government of Ghana, altruistic institutions, voluntary organisations, private companies, faith-based organisations and well-meaning individuals felt the need to help the poor, the sick, the elderly and vulnerable people in response to the economic difficulties inflicted by the pandemic. Gifts were sent to hospitals, prisons, the poor and the government of Ghana. This act of generosity fostered, secured and affirmed life. The pandemic demonstrated our mutual dependency, togetherness, relatedness and shared vulnerability as the government of Ghana, in collaboration with faith-based organisations, provided cooked and dry food packs to vulnerable people, the sick and the elderly within the catchment area of the lockdown. A total of 50.2 million Ghana cedi in cash was offered by the government of Ghana during the lockdown to 400,000 of the most disadvantaged citizens under the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) Programme (Ibrahim et al. 2020; Ministry of Finance 2020). This brings to the fore human empathy, mutual aid and life-affirming acts of solidarity. Despite the unexpected economic crisis as a result of the pandemic, local leaders such as Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, the Asantehene (the king of the Asante), established support funds to assist the less fortunate. On 1 April 2020, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, established a 1 million Ghana cedi COVID-19 fund. This inspired Asanteman Europe (an association of Asantes in Europe) to donate over EUR 23,000 worth of personal protective equipment (PPE) to testing institutions and other frontline workers in hospitals (Baah 2020; Mensah 2020).
Affirmative forms of community and solidarity were clearly at play during the pandemic when the government of Ghana fully covered the cost of water and electricity consumption to cushion the impact on one million health workers and entrepreneurs (Asante 2022; Ghanaweb 2020b). The government subsidised 50 per cent of water and electricity consumption of all other customers from April to June 2020 to meet the minimum criteria for lockdown readiness (Assiseh 2022; Ministry of Finance 2020) This gesture opened ‘other worlds’ that put affirmative biopolitics at the centre of politics.
The government supported small and medium-sized businesses with a soft credit programme of up to 600 million Ghana cedis in partnership with the National Board of Small-Scale Industries, business and trade associations and selected commercial and rural banks (Presidential Address 2020b). The Ghanaian president appointed a board of trustees to supervise the donation of funds by altruistic institutions, voluntary organisations, private companies and other well-meaning people (Presidential Address 2020b). Another striking example of possibilities for an affirmative biopolitics was when the president and vice president pledged their April–June 2021 salaries to the COVID-19 fund, while some parliamentarians gave half of their April–June 2021 salaries (Ansah 2020). The Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo, for example, repeatedly highlighted the role of communities’ ‘values’ and their ‘responsibility’ for their own health regarding the pandemic (Presidential Address 2020b). Solidarity campaigns, reciprocal and non-hierarchical mutual aid networks and actions from the president of Ghana, altruistic institutions, voluntary organisations, private companies and other well-meaning people, such as the association of Asantes in Europe, business and trade associations, selected commercial and rural banks and Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, decidedly challenged and defied the biopolitical establishment.
The existence of each one of the actions of the entities indicated above is an indicator of collective commitment and solidarity against a common threat that Ghanaian society faced, and the world as a whole. Crucially, these conditions are inexorably good bases for evaluating each country's response to the pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic provided the possibility for reimagining a politics of life that is effectively oriented towards reconsidering the notion of solidarity and self-help by replacing conditional and conditioned support with safeguarding the life and survival of each and every one of us (Rþza Taþkale 2022). Equally important, the emergence of new bonds, instances of life-affirming practices and solidarity, collective effort, togetherness and coordination as witnessed during the pandemic in Ghana, offer an opportunity to rethink our humanity and the necessity of an affirmative biopolitical order.
Concluding Remarks
This article sought to analyse the raft of policies that were undertaken in Ghana in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic and how these policies were rooted in biopolitical rationality and techniques of protecting life. It has shown how biopolitical governance in the context of Ghana was firmly enabled and radically legitimised in halting the spread of the pandemic. The article has suggested that contemporary modes of governing and optimising populations are increasingly characterised by the crisis of the liberal state in which biological life itself becomes the object and target of political power. It contended that contemporary forms of biopolitics as played out in the politics of COVID-19 is a renewed investment in the potential of biological life. The dominant discourse of contemporary Foucauldian biopolitics is arguably no longer that of a subjugated group of individuals whose life must be disqualified, disallowed and abandoned but fundamentally a specific political rationality to deal with the problem of life. The responses in the context of Ghana conceptually and practically open new ways of thinking about how the notion of life provokes biopolitics.
The article has argued that critical conceptions of life call for a reconsideration and emergence of a biopolitical state along the axis on which human life escapes the techniques and technologies that govern it. For this reason, the optimisation and management of populations, in its many ways, call for an affirmative mode of politics. The more affirmative mode of politics is indicative of the capacity of humans to develop togetherness and nearness, spontaneous forms of support, collective organisation, friendship, communal participation and political engagement during times of crises. An affirmative mode of politics starkly reminds us of our collective well-being which is based on a shared vulnerability and precariousness in responding to a crisis such as the pandemic.
The Ghanaian case certainly moves beyond biopolitical imaginary towards a more affirmative mode of politics, as the government of Ghana, faith-based organisations and individuals felt the need to help the poor, the sick, the elderly and the most vulnerable in response to the economic difficulties inflicted by the pandemic. There is a need for a more rigorous understanding of alternative modernities and world-buildings of biopolitics. Alternative modernities and world-buildings of biopolitics cannot be simply alternative descriptions, but rather a questioning of our historical present. Alternative modernities and world-buildings of biopolitics necessitate alternative modes of governance and thus new culturally situated forms of modernisation. While biopolitics is still key to our understanding of the politics of our present, the life at stake in biopolitical governance today has changed. Crucially, whether or not one fully agrees with Ghana's responses to the pandemic governance, there is much here that demands urgent theoretical attention.
Acknowledgements
The author declares that no funds, grants or other support were received during the preparation of this manuscript. The author has no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.
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