Politics of life: Provincializing biopolitics in crisis governance.

Abstract

This paper examines Ghana's COVID-19 response through a biopolitical and biosecurity lens. Drawing on Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics, it analyzes how interventions such as lockdowns, biosurveillance, and vaccination campaigns functioned both as technologies of care and instruments of control, expanding state authority over biological and social life. The study shows that biopolitics in Ghana did not replicate Western models but emerged as a provincialized and context-dependent form of power shaped by infrastructural constraints, informal economies, and postcolonial state formation. Pandemic governance was, therefore, adaptive and improvisational, requiring negotiation between epidemiological control and socioeconomic survival. By bringing biopolitics into dialogue with postcolonial theory and necropolitics, the paper conceptualizes pandemic governance as a hybrid regime in which life-preserving and life-abandoning logics coexist. It thus challenges universalist assumptions and repositions the Global South as central to rethinking the governance of life.