The Normative Emergence of Death in the Organization of American States’ Responses to COVID-19: towards a Regional Governance of Death

Abstract

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has been (re)creating new global geographies of death, which specifically impact the Global South and expose its continuum of vulnerabilities – unequally distributed in terms of race, gender, class, and so on. In the Americas, we can identify the emergence of a new regional governance of death, associated with a set of practical recommendations by the Organization of American States (OAS) constraining states’ policy responses to COVID-19 and installing a new global governance lexicon. Recommendations concerning the disposal of dead bodies, full respect for both collective and family grief, and indications of alternative ways to conduct funerals and memorial services, for instance, seem to evoke new multilateral responses, paving the way for a new governance model: one that centres death within regional policymaking. This points to a change in the treatment of death from a purely private to a politically infused issue. Theoretically, this article aims to bridge the gap between Death Studies and Global Governance literatures. Supported by Michel Foucault’s genealogical method, the goal is to critically reconceptualise the meanings and framings of death landscapes in the Americas, pointing us to the correlation of forces that enabled the normative emergence of death in the OAS in this particular historical moment.