Introduction
The arrival of the highly lethal new coronavirus (COVID-19) in early 2020 was impossible to overlook, as people around the world turned their attention to the virus that had crossed borders and spread globally. The pandemic marked a profound moment of global disruption, drawing attention to the capacity of states to govern a large-scale biological crisis under conditions of uncertainty (Forman, Reference Forman2020). In Ghana, as elsewhere, the pandemic generated intense public debate, extensive media scrutiny, and heightened concern about the resilience of state institutions. Government officials, public health experts, and media actors engaged in sustained efforts to interpret the evolving risks posed by the virus and to justify extraordinary interventions aimed at limiting transmission and safeguarding population health. Early pandemic discourse frequently projected catastrophic outcomes for African states (CNN, 2020; UNECA, 2020; Wasserman, Reference Wasserman and Moynihan2020), raising concerns about the vulnerability of healthcare systems and economies. Existing capacity limitations placed considerable pressure on Ghana’s health infrastructure. Ghana, with a population of over 30 million people, had only 200 ventilators available (Maclean & Marks, Reference Maclean and Marks2020), and just one ICU bed for every 200,000 people (Siaw-Frimpong et al., Reference Siaw-Frimpong, Touray and Sefa2021). At the onset of the pandemic, Ghana had only three laboratories with testing capabilities (Owusu & Crentsil, Reference Owusu and Crentsil2021; Sarkodie et al., Reference Sarkodie, Asiedu-Bekoe, Laryea, Ampofo, Phillips, Samba, Da Costa, Nsiah-Asare, Asamoah-Baah, Odame, Ohene, Amoako and Kuma-Aboagye2021). Against this backdrop, Ghana’s President articulated a framing that foregrounded the primacy of life over economic recovery: “We know how to bring the economy back to life. What we do not know is how to bring people back to life” (Akufo-Addo, Reference Akufo-Addo2020; Peat, Reference Peat2020). In response to the virus, the Ghanaian government introduced a range of measures, including lockdowns, biosurveillance systems, and vaccination campaigns, designed to curb transmission and prevent health system collapse (McKeown, Reference McKeown2022). While these interventions were framed as necessary to preserve life, they also expanded state authority into domains of everyday existence, including bodily movement, social interaction, and biological risk. The pandemic thus foregrounded fundamental questions about the relationship between public health, political power, and the governance of life.
Existing scholarship on COVID-19 governance has been dominated by analyses of Western contexts, often focusing on emergency powers, surveillance expansion, and the normalization of exceptional measures (Agamben, Reference Agamben2020a, Reference Agamben2020c; Harari, Reference Harari2020; Peters, Reference Peters2020; Sfetcu, Reference Sfetcu2020; Sylvia, Reference Sylvia2020). While these studies provide valuable insights, they tend to universalize forms of governance rooted in materially and historically specific conditions, including strong welfare systems, formal labor markets, and advanced technological infrastructures. As a result, they offer limited analytical traction for understanding how pandemic governance unfolds in contexts characterized by infrastructural scarcity, informal economies, and postcolonial state formation. This paper addresses this gap by examining Ghana’s COVID-19 response through a biopolitical framework. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s understanding of biopower as a form of governance concerned with the regulation and optimization of life, the study analyzes how pandemic interventions operated simultaneously as practices of care and techniques of control. However, rather than treating Ghana as a site for applying an established theoretical framework, the paper uses the case to interrogate and extend the conceptual boundaries of biopolitics itself. Applying Foucault’s concept of biopolitics to COVID-19 governance in Ghana is significant not only in terms of geography, but also in terms of form, context, and implication.
Empirically, Ghana presents a compelling case. Despite significant resource constraints, the country recorded relatively low infection and mortality rates compared to global and continental averages. By the end of 2024, Ghana’s infection rate, measured as the percentage of the population infected, stood at 0.49%, notably lower than the African average of 0.85% and the global average of 8.63%. In terms of the death rate, calculated as the percentage of deaths among confirmed cases, Ghana reported a rate of 0.85%, which was not only below Africa’s average of 2.01% but also slightly lower than the global average of 0.99% (Worldometer, 2025). Ghana’s response combined targeted lockdowns, biosurveillance, public health communication, and vaccination campaigns within a context where large segments of the population depend on informal, daily income activities. This required a form of governance that could not fully suspend economic life but instead had to negotiate between epidemiological control and socioeconomic survival. Rather than treating Ghana’s response as merely an instance of Foucauldian biopolitics, the analysis shows how governing life during COVID-19 involved improvisation, selective enforcement, and hybrid forms of authority that combined technocratic expertise with moral and political appeals.
Theoretically, the paper advances the concept of provincialized biopolitics to capture how governing life operates under conditions of constraint, adaptation, and historical inequality. The paper does not argue that a Foucauldian approach offers a comprehensive explanation of all political decisions taken by the Ghanaian government during the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, it argues that biopolitics in the Global South is not a derivative or incomplete version of Western models, but a distinct mode of governance shaped by improvisation, selective enforcement, and hybrid authority structures. By bringing Foucauldian biopolitics into dialogue with postcolonial theory and necropolitics, the study further demonstrates that pandemic governance involves simultaneous management of life and exposure to risk, structured by both domestic conditions and global inequalities. In doing so, the paper makes three contributions. First, it shows that biopolitical governance in the Global South is context-dependent and shaped by material and historical constraints. Second, it reconceptualizes biopolitical power as adaptive and improvisational rather than fully institutionalized. Third, it situates biopolitics within a broader global and postcolonial framework, highlighting how the capacity to “make live” (Foucault, Reference Foucault and Macey2003) is unevenly distributed across the international system.
To clarify Ghana’s response, it is useful to situate it against policy trajectories in Western contexts such as the United Kingdom and the United States. While all three cases deployed biopolitical interventions aimed at preserving life, the form, duration, and underlying assumptions of these interventions differed significantly. In the United Kingdom, pandemic governance relied on prolonged nationwide lockdowns, extensive fiscal support such as furlough schemes, and centralized testing and tracing systems. These measures relied on a socioeconomic environment in which large segments of the population could withdraw from public life without immediate threats to subsistence, supported by relatively robust welfare systems and formal labor markets (Joyce, Reference Joyce2021; Wielgoszewska et al., Reference Wielgoszewska, Maddock, Green, Di Gessa, Parsons, Griffith, Croft, Stevenson, Booth, Silverwood, Bann, Patalay, Hughes, Chaturvedi, Howe, Fitzsimons, Katikireddi and Ploubidis2022).
By contrast, Ghana’s response was marked by a shorter and spatially targeted lockdown, limited to Accra and Kumasi, and lifted within three weeks. In a context where a substantial proportion of the population depends on informal, daily income activities, prolonged lockdown would have produced significant socioeconomic harm, potentially exceeding the direct risks posed by the virus (Danquah & Schotte, Reference Danquah and Schotte2020; Schotte et al., Reference Schotte, Danquah, Osei and Sen2023). Ghana’s response, therefore, involved a negotiation between epidemiological control and economic survival. The state shifted toward biosurveillance, public health communication, and targeted interventions, reflecting a more adaptive form of biopolitical regulation.
The contrast with the United States further underscores this point. The U.S. response was characterized by institutional fragmentation, with federal and state authorities pursuing divergent strategies that produced a patchwork of interventions (Birkland et al., Reference Birkland, Taylor, Crow and DeLeo2021; Kettl, Reference Kettl2020). Ghana, despite resource constraints, exhibited a centralized and coordinated approach, with executive authority shaping public health messaging, mobilizing compliance, and deploying surveillance tools. The population was addressed as a collective requiring coordinated management rather than as competing jurisdictional units.
This comparison reflects not only differences in capacity but also in the logic of governance. In the United Kingdom, control was sustained through prolonged restrictions enabled by fiscal buffering; in the United States, it was fragmented by federalism and political contestation; in Ghana, it was shaped by the need to govern life under conditions of infrastructural scarcity and socioeconomic precarity. This required a form of improvisational biopolitics in which the state could not suspend economic life and instead recalibrated its interventions to align with lived realities. Ghana’s COVID-19 response demonstrates how governing life in a postcolonial context involves navigating tensions between epidemiological control, informal economic survival, and selective techno-surveillance (Mills, Reference Mills2017; Nguyen, Reference Nguyen2010). It reveals that biopolitics in the Global South cannot be understood as a derivative of Western models but as a distinct mode of governing life shaped by adaptation, negotiation, and constraint.
The paper proceeds as follows. The next section outlines the methodological approach. This is followed by a conceptual discussion of biopolitics and its postcolonial extensions. The subsequent sections analyze Ghana’s pandemic response through key domains, including lockdowns, vaccination, and biosecurity. The final section reflects on the implications for biopolitics, biosecurity, and global health governance.
Methodology
This research is based on a qualitative methodological approach that integrates documentary analysis with interviews to investigate Ghana’s biopolitical response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis draws on a diverse set of data sources, including government policy documents, presidential addresses, legal directives, media reports, peer-reviewed papers, and publications from international health organizations. These materials are complemented by semi-structured interviews conducted with key government officials directly involved in the design and implementation of Ghana’s pandemic response. These interviews provide insight into the rationalities, decision-making processes, and practical constraints that shaped state interventions during the crisis.
The study is guided by Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics as its primary analytical framework. This lens enables an examination of how state measures operated simultaneously as practices of care and techniques of control. Through an interpretive approach, the analysis identifies how interventions such as lockdowns, contact tracing, vaccination campaigns, biosurveillance, and public health messaging embodied forms of biopower. Particular attention is paid to how these measures were rationalized by policymakers and how they reflected broader logics of governing life and risk.
Methodologically, the study adopts an interpretive and analytical strategy rather than a statistical one. It emphasizes the meanings, discourses, and power relations embedded in Ghana’s pandemic response. By triangulating documentary evidence with insights from government officials, the paper provides a more nuanced account of how biopolitical governance was conceptualized and operationalized within a postcolonial, resource-constrained context. This approach allows for a deeper understanding of the interplay between formal policy frameworks and the lived realities of governance during a global health emergency.
Data triangulation and archival validity
Official documents, dashboards, presidential speeches, and administrative reports are not treated as transparent representations of social reality. They are analyzed as state-produced artefacts of pandemic legibility through which authorities rendered populations governable and measurable. As scholarship on indicators and public health governance shows, metrics do not simply record reality but help constitute policy objects and authorize intervention, making them central political technologies in pandemic governance (Adams et al., Reference Adams, Chandler, Kelly and Livingston2024; Hansen & Porter, Reference Hansen and Porter2012; Hoeyer et al., Reference Hoeyer, Bauer and Pickersgill2019; Merry, Reference Merry2011).
The documentary archive is treated as co-constitutive of governance rather than as neutral fact, drawing on critical literatures on state metrics (Adams, Reference Adams2016; Lakoff, Reference Lakoff2017; Merry, Reference Merry2011; Pichelstorfer & Paul, Reference Pichelstorfer and Paul2022). Government records are read for both their substantive claims and their performative effects, including what they make visible and what they omit. This is particularly important in Ghana, where pandemic statistics and official communications formed part of a broader effort to establish administrative authority and public trust under conditions of uncertainty (McKeown, Reference McKeown2026b).
To address the risk of reproducing a state-sponsored narrative, the analysis triangulates official records with interviews, media reporting, and secondary scholarship in order to identify convergences and gaps between official representations and the practical realities of pandemic governance. Metrics and documentation are, therefore, treated as part of the empirical object of governance itself (Adams et al., Reference Adams, Chandler, Kelly and Livingston2024; Briggs & Nichter, Reference Briggs and Nichter2009; Hoeyer et al., Reference Hoeyer, Bauer and Pickersgill2019).
Provincializing biopolitics
Biopolitics refers to a form of power in which the administration of human life becomes a central concern of governance (Foucault, Reference Foucault and Hurley1978). Situated at the intersection of biology and politics (Schirato et al., Reference Schirato, Danaher and Webb2012), it describes how governing authorities extend their reach over both biological processes and social existence (Lemke & Trump, Reference Lemke and Trump2011; Sfetcu, Reference Sfetcu2020). The COVID-19 pandemic made visible the extent to which biological life has become an object of political calculation and intervention. While epidemiological expertise guided efforts to contain the virus, the translation of such knowledge into policy was deeply embedded in political rationalities. As Chigudu (Reference Chigudu2020) observes, pandemics do not simply unfold as biological events; they also possess a distinctly political life.
This section does not merely apply Foucauldian biopolitics to the Ghanaian case; rather, it reconceptualizes biopolitics through a postcolonial lens in order to account for historically uneven forms of governing life. In doing so, it advances the project of provincializing biopolitics by demonstrating that the governance of life cannot be understood outside the material, historical, and geopolitical conditions within which it operates.
Foucault’s work conceptualizes a historical transformation beginning in the eighteenth century, when life itself emerged as a central problem for the state. Biopolitics, he argues, “deals with the population… as a political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem, and as power’s problem” (Foucault, Reference Foucault and Macey2003, p. 245). With this shift, the human species becomes the object of a political strategy or a strategy of power (Sfetcu, Reference Sfetcu2020). Political authority thus extends beyond laws and territorial control to encompass the management of biological processes such as health, reproduction, and longevity (Foucault, Reference Foucault and Hurley1978). This transformation marks a departure from sovereign power, historically defined by the right to “take life or let live,” toward a modern form of power oriented toward “making live and letting die” (Foucault, Reference Foucault and Macey2003, p. 241).
In this formulation, power operates not primarily through repression but through the regulation, optimization, and administration of life. Biopolitics entails what Foucault describes as an “explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations” (Foucault, Reference Foucault1990, p. 140). These techniques include public health policies, surveillance systems, welfare arrangements, and regulatory frameworks that shape the everyday conditions of life. Power is not only exercised through formal institutions but is also reflected in social practices and human behavior, particularly in the ways individuals internalize and comply with subtle forms of regulation that sustain social order (Policante, Reference Policante2010). In this sense, biopower functions as a diffuse and productive force that manages, shapes, and optimizes human life.
At the same time, biopolitics contains an inherent tension. While it is oriented toward the preservation and enhancement of life, it simultaneously produces distinctions that determine whose lives are protected and whose are exposed to risk. As Foucault (Reference Foucault1990) notes, the very mechanisms that seek to “make live” may also justify the marginalization or abandonment of certain populations. Biopolitics is, therefore, not merely a project of care but also a site of exclusion, inequality, and potential violence. As Sfetcu (Reference Sfetcu2020) observes, while biopower seeks to maximize life, it also possesses a “dark side” in which the protection of some lives may necessitate the sacrifice or neglect of others. As Foucault further describes in The Birth of Biopolitics, biopolitics is both a way to run the government and a criticism of government (Foucault, Reference Foucault2008). This limitation becomes particularly evident in contexts such as Ghana, where the governance of life unfolds under conditions of infrastructural scarcity, informal economies, and postcolonial state formation. In such settings, the capacity to optimize life is uneven, contested, and often constrained, requiring forms of governance that depart from the institutionalized and technologically stabilized models implicit in Foucauldian accounts derived from Western contexts.
Like colonization, biopolitics is the strategy through which the colonizing authority uses political power to manipulate the colonized people (Said, Reference Said1979). Governments intervene through policy frameworks to regulate and sustain population life, addressing domains such as reproduction, health, welfare systems, housing, and broader conditions of social existence (McKeown, Reference McKeown2022). These actions demonstrate how managing human existence has become a defining feature of contemporary governance (Foucault, Reference Foucault and Macey2003, Reference Foucault2008). Yet, this account of biopolitical governance remains analytically incomplete unless situated within the broader historical and geopolitical conditions through which modern power emerged, particularly those shaped by colonialism, race, and empire.
A postcolonial extension of biopolitics is, therefore, necessary because Foucault’s genealogy, while foundational, is limited by its predominantly European archive. Postcolonial and decolonial scholars demonstrate that modern power cannot be understood apart from the histories of empire, racial hierarchy, and colonial rule (McKeown, Reference McKeown2026a). From this perspective, colonialism was not external to biopolitics but constitutive of its emergence. The differentiation between lives to be fostered and those rendered expendable was historically produced through imperial encounters that racialized humanity and stratified access to life-sustaining resources (Mignolo, Reference Mignolo2000; Quijano, Reference Quijano2000). These interventions suggest that biopolitics should not be understood as a universal model of governance but as a historically situated formation whose logics are shaped by colonial hierarchies, global inequalities, and uneven distributions of life chances. This move is central to the project of provincializing biopolitics, which seeks to displace its implicit Eurocentrism and re-anchor it in diverse geopolitical contexts.
Stoler (Reference Stoler1995) demonstrates that bourgeois order, sexuality, and racial governance were co-constituted within imperial contexts, positioning empire as central rather than peripheral to European modernity. Extending this insight, Mbembe (Reference Mbembe2003) argues that sovereignty in colonial settings operated through the simultaneous regulation of life and the production of death, revealing the limits of a purely life-oriented conception of power. What emerges is not a binary between biopolitics and necropolitics, but a continuum in which the management of life is inseparable from the exposure of certain populations to premature death. Fassin (Reference Fassin, Dillon and Neal2008) further reframes this dynamic through the notion of the “politics of life,” showing how moral economies and global inequalities structure whose lives are protected and whose suffering is normalized. Rather than representing a conceptual rupture, necropolitics can be understood as an immanent limit within biopolitics, revealing how the project of “making live” is sustained through the selective exposure of certain populations to death. This relationship is particularly visible in postcolonial contexts, where the governance of life is inseparable from histories of abandonment, structural inequality, and differential vulnerability.
This reconceptualization has important implications for International Relations. It shifts biopolitics from a framework centered on domestic governance to one embedded in global hierarchies of power. As Anghie (Reference Anghie2005) and Grovogui (Reference Grovogui1996) show, sovereignty itself was forged through colonial encounters, meaning that contemporary regimes of health, security, and mobility remain shaped by these historical asymmetries. Biopolitics, in this sense, operates not only within states but across an international order structured by inequality, where the capacity to secure life is unevenly distributed. Kelly argues that the international can be read biopolitically, as affluent states secure the life chances of their populations through arrangements that externalize vulnerability onto poorer ones (Kelly, Reference Kelly2010). Howell and Richter-Montpetit further show that Foucauldian security studies often reproduce a methodological whiteness that treats colonial and racial violence as secondary rather than constitutive of biopolitical power (Howell & Richter-Montpetit, Reference Howell and Richter-Montpetit2019). A postcolonial biopolitics, therefore, treats coloniality as a foundational condition through which modern regimes of health, security, mobility, and surveillance became thinkable (Anghie, Reference Anghie2005). Viewed through this lens, biopolitics in the Global South should not be analyzed as a deficient copy of European modernity, but as a formation shaped by colonial infrastructures, racialized inequalities, and uneven access to life-sustaining resources.
Ghana’s COVID-19 response provides a compelling case for extending this framework. Invoking Foucault is not simply an application of an established theory but a means of interrogating how biopolitical power operates in a postcolonial context. Much of the early scholarship on COVID-19 governance, including Agamben’s critique of emergency powers and Žižek’s reflections on crisis ethics, has been predominantly centered on Western contexts (Agamben, Reference Agamben2020a, Reference Agamben2020c; Harari, Reference Harari2020; Peters, Reference Peters2020; Žižek, Reference Žižek2020). Conversely, studies of African responses have often focused on economic and epidemiological challenges while neglecting theoretical analyses of governance (Aberese-Ako et al., Reference Aberese-Ako, Immurana, Dalaba, Anumu, Ofosu and Gyapong2022; Anyanwu & Salami, Reference Anyanwu and Salami2021; Asante & Mills, Reference Asante and Mills2020; Cabore et al., Reference Cabore, Karamagi, Kipruto, Asamani, Droti, Seydi, Titi-Ofei, Impouma, Yao, Yoti, Zawaira, Tumusiime, Talisuna, Kasolo and Moeti2020; Gilbert et al., Reference Gilbert, Pullano, Pinotti, Valdano, Poletto, Boëlle, D’Ortenzio, Yazdanpanah, Eholie, Altmann, Gutierrez, Kraemer and Colizza2020; Kenu et al., Reference Kenu, Odikro, Malm, Asiedu-Bekoe, Noora, Frimpong, Calys-Tagoe and Koram2020; Loembé et al., Reference Loembé, Tshangela, Salyer, Varma, Ouma and Nkengasong2020).
Recent Ghanaian scholarship has begun to address this gap. Amo-Agyemang (Reference Amo-Agyemang2024, Reference Amo-Agyemang2025) rethinks Ghana’s COVID-19 interventions beyond conventional biopolitical frameworks, while Diedong and Puorideme (Reference Diedong and Puorideme2024) analyze presidential discourse through disciplinary normalization and biopower, identifying a shift from coercive measures to appeals for self-regulation. Building on these contributions, this paper moves beyond descriptive accounts to foreground the role of improvisation, socioeconomic precarity, and techno-governance in shaping pandemic responses. These dynamics are central to understanding how governing life unfolds in contexts where formal infrastructures are limited, and survival is contingent on informal economies.
This approach synthesizes insights from a broader African biopolitics literature, including Fassin’s (Reference Fassin, Dillon and Neal2008) analysis of the politics of life and death, Geissler et al. (Reference Geissler, Rottenburg, Zenker, Geissler, Rottenburg and Zenker2012)’s account of African biopolitics at the “fuzzy fringes” of formal governance, Nguyen’s (Reference Nguyen2007) concept of therapeutic citizenship, and Mills’s (Reference Mills2014, Reference Mills2017) notion of biopolitical precarity. Situated within this body of work, Ghana’s pandemic response reveals that biopolitics in the Global South is not a straightforward transplantation of Western models but a context-specific formation shaped by colonial legacies, informal economies, and hybrid forms of authority.
While Foucault’s framework emphasizes the governance of life, Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics provides a necessary extension for understanding how power also operates through the exposure of populations to death (Mbembe, Reference Mbembe2003, Reference Mbembe2019). In the Ghanaian context, pandemic interventions such as lockdowns, vaccination campaigns, and biosurveillance reflected attempts to optimize life, yet they also produced conditions of deprivation and exclusion. Informal workers faced acute economic hardship, relief efforts were uneven, and enforcement measures exposed vulnerable populations to coercion (Lee, Reference Lee2020; Sandset, Reference Sandset2021). The pandemic measures intensified existing North–South inequalities (Balfour et al., Reference Balfour, Bomassi and Martinelli2022; Oxfam International, 2022; Voituriez & Chancel, Reference Voituriez and Chancel2021). Global inequalities in vaccine distribution further underscored the dependence of postcolonial states on external actors in exercising life-preserving governance (Blanes, Reference Blanes, Duca and Meny-Gibert2023).
The pandemic thus revealed a fundamental paradox: governance was simultaneously life-affirming and life-abandoning. Biopolitical power operated through efforts to “make live,” while necropolitical dynamics shaped who could be left to endure risk, deprivation, or death. This paradox is not an anomaly but shows the need to understand biopolitics not as a universal model but as a historically situated and unevenly distributed form of power.
The COVID-19 pandemic ultimately rendered biopolitics visible at a global scale. Governments across the world deployed lockdowns, surveillance systems, vaccination campaigns, and public health measures to regulate movement, manage risk, and coordinate collective life. In doing so, political authority became directly invested in the management of bodies and life processes, extending its reach into the most intimate dimensions of human existence. However, as this analysis demonstrates, these processes cannot be understood through universal frameworks alone; they must be situated within the specific historical, material, and postcolonial conditions that shape how life is governed in different parts of the world.
Biopolitics in action
This section examines how Ghana operationalized biopolitical governance during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on the concrete measures deployed to manage life and health. It analyzes the state’s strategies ranging from lockdowns and social distancing to mass vaccination campaigns and biosurveillance through the lens of Foucauldian biopolitics. The discussion not only evaluates their public health effectiveness but also interrogates their socioeconomic implications, legitimacy, and adaptability to Ghana’s postcolonial and resource-constrained context. In doing so, it highlights the interplay between governmental authority, population compliance, and the lived realities of citizens navigating both the biological threat of the virus and the political realities of pandemic governance. The measures discussed below are analyzed not only as public health interventions but also through the official metrics, reports, and communicative forms by which the state made those interventions visible and authoritative.
Lockdown, social distancing, and quarantine
In many high-income countries, lockdowns became the central instrument of pandemic governance, supported by welfare systems, remote work infrastructure, and state capacity to enforce prolonged restrictions (Hale et al., Reference Hale, Angrist, Kira, Petherick, Phillips and Webster2020). These measures reflect a form of institutionalized biopolitics in which populations can be regulated through relatively stable economic and administrative systems. In Ghana, however, this model proved only partially applicable. The government implemented a short and geographically limited lockdown, reflecting the structural constraints of an economy in which a large proportion of the population depends on daily informal work (Danquah & Schotte, Reference Danquah and Schotte2020). For many households, remaining at home without income posed an immediate threat to survival, making prolonged lockdowns socially and economically untenable. This divergence does not indicate policy failure but rather the emergence of a context-specific biopolitical logic shaped by economic necessity, infrastructural limits, and the realities of informal livelihoods.
In dominant global health frameworks, lockdowns are often treated as universally applicable tools of pandemic control, based on assumptions derived largely from high-income contexts. These assumptions include the availability of social protection systems, the feasibility of remote work, and access to essential services within the household. However, Ghana’s experience challenges the universality of this model. While the government did implement lockdown measures, these were limited in duration and scope, reflecting the practical constraints of enforcing prolonged restrictions in an economy structured around informal labor. The characterization of lockdowns as “Westcentric,” therefore, does not deny the use of similar measures in African contexts, since Sierra Leone, for instance, imposed lockdowns during the Ebola crisis in 2014–2015 (BBC, 2015b), but highlights how global pandemic governance frameworks often overlook the socioeconomic conditions necessary for their effective implementation. This distinction underscores the importance of situating biopolitical interventions within their material and historical contexts (Forman, Reference Forman2020; Peters, Reference Peters2020).
Lockdowns, as widely advocated by global institutions during the early months of COVID-19, presumed that citizens could withdraw from public life, stockpile resources, and shift to remote work, conditions predominantly associated with formal economies and middle-class infrastructure (Egger et al., Reference Egger, Jones, Justino, Manhique and Santos2020; Haider et al., Reference Haider, Osman, Gadzekpo, Akipede, Asogun, Ansumana, Lessells, Khan, Hamid, Yeboah-Manu, Mboera, Shayo, Mmbaga, Urassa, Musoke, Kapata, Ferrand, Kapata, Stigler and McCoy2020). These assumptions were especially evident in guidance from the WHO and echoed in many Western models of pandemic preparedness. For instance, the World Bank (2020) highlighted the severe difficulty of enforcing stay-at-home orders in African urban areas where people rely on daily income and live in overcrowded settlements. This misalignment is where the notion of Westcentrism applies, not in the existence of lockdowns themselves, but in the uncritical global replication of governance models developed in and for materially different societies. Egger et al. (Reference Egger, Jones, Justino, Manhique and Santos2020) highlight that resource-limited settings lack the economic buffer to sustain prolonged restrictions, a reality evident in Ghana’s urban slums where residents depend on daily earnings (Danquah & Schotte, Reference Danquah and Schotte2020; Foli & Ohemeng, Reference Foli and Ohemeng2022; Khoo, Reference Khoo2020). This mirrors broader findings on pandemic governance in Africa, where governments struggled to balance public health with economic survival. As Mbembe (Reference Mbembe2003) and Chigudu (Reference Chigudu2020) remind us, applying biopolitical or public health frameworks without attending to the colonial and postcolonial histories that shape local capacities risks epistemic violence and governance failure.
Historical precedents such as Sierra Leone’s localized lockdowns during the Ebola crisis demonstrate that restrictive measures are not unique to Western contexts (Wilkinson & Fairhead, Reference Wilkinson and Fairhead2017). However, the scale, duration, and global standardization of COVID-19 lockdowns marked a significant shift. In Ghana, the decision to impose only a short, partial lockdown reflects an adaptive strategy shaped by the disproportionate socioeconomic costs of prolonged restrictions (Danquah & Schotte, Reference Danquah and Schotte2020; Khoo, Reference Khoo2020), not because the threat was lower. Rather than fully adopting a disciplinary model of governance, the state relied on targeted restrictions, public communication, and biosurveillance, reflecting what Ong (Reference Ong2006) describes as “graduated sovereignty.” In such contexts, we witness a shift from strict disciplinary regimes to more negotiable, context-sensitive interventions that involve balancing epidemiological goals with the material conditions necessary for survival (Foucault, Reference Foucault, Senellart, Ewald and Fontana2007; Sylvia, Reference Sylvia2020).
This adaptive turn should not be read as evidence that technology, improvisation, and informal economies are separable domains. Pandemic governance proceeds through their articulation, as technological systems rely on discretionary and locally mediated practices of compliance, while informal economies remain embedded within regulatory processes. Rather than existing outside governance, they compel states to recalibrate biopolitical interventions so that population management remains compatible with the livelihood imperatives of those who cannot withdraw from circulation. Pandemic governance, therefore, operates through both technological rationality and improvisational adaptation, especially where welfare protections and infrastructural reach are limited.
This dynamic is evident when Ghana is situated alongside research on the United States, a technologically advanced Global North context whose COVID-19 response nonetheless exposed the limits of high-capacity public health governance. Decoteau’s analysis of Chicago shows that data-driven racial equity policies relied on emergency management techniques that were temporary and triaged, and unable to address structural vulnerabilities rooted in fragmented care systems, precarious labor, and racialized disinvestment (Decoteau, Reference Decoteau2024a). Garrett and Decoteau (Reference Garrett and Decoteau2023) show that COVID-19 data systems linked access to public resources to legibility within state projects of quantification. At the same time, key determinants of vulnerability such as housing insecurity, labor precarity, and uneven care access exceeded the scope of epidemiological measurement. What emerges is not a coherent technological model opposed to improvisation, but a hybrid formation in which digital tools, administrative discretion, and uneven infrastructures operate together (Decoteau, Reference Decoteau2024b).
More broadly, crises such as COVID-19 unfold against what Anderson et al. (Reference Anderson, Grove, Rickards and Kearnes2020) describe as slow emergencies, shaped by long-standing structural inequalities. From this perspective, improvisation does not signal institutional weakness, and technological deployment does not imply coherent state control. Both are modalities through which states manage populations under conditions they do not fully command. Ghana’s response is best understood through how biosurveillance, public communication, partial lockdowns, and livelihood-sensitive adjustments were assembled within a postcolonial political economy shaped by informality and infrastructural scarcity. The analytic contrast, therefore, should not be drawn between technological governance in the Global North and improvisational governance in the Global South (Anderson et al., Reference Anderson, Grove, Rickards and Kearnes2020).
The Ghanaian government faced a fundamental dilemma of enforcing life-preserving public health measures without deepening poverty and social vulnerability. Lockdown policies disproportionately affected low-income populations in densely populated urban areas, where savings were limited and access to basic services was uneven (Sen, Reference Sen2020). In response, the state implemented selective restrictions while expanding monitoring systems and public health interventions. This reflects a form of biopolitical governance that operates through adaptation under constraint, where the protection of life remains inseparable from the management of socioeconomic risk.
Alongside these constraints, the government of Ghana intensified its systematic monitoring of the health status of the population. Ghana’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic showcased a notable degree of local agency and a public health-oriented governance approach. Unlike purely infrastructure-driven models seen in many high-income countries, Ghana’s response combined digital tools with locally embedded strategies of governance. This included the development of homegrown testing systems, mobile tracker applications, and targeted public health campaigns (Dzawu, Reference Dzawu2020; KNUST, 2020; Mastercard Foundation, 2020; Nkansah, Reference Nkansah2020). This was evident in achievements such as a comparatively wide-reaching testing program (Owusu & Crentsil, Reference Owusu and Crentsil2021; Sarkodie et al., Reference Sarkodie, Asiedu-Bekoe, Laryea, Ampofo, Phillips, Samba, Da Costa, Nsiah-Asare, Asamoah-Baah, Odame, Ohene, Amoako and Kuma-Aboagye2021; WHO Africa, 2024) and comparatively low infection and mortality figures (GHS, 2022; Johns Hopkins University, 2023; Worldometer, 2025). These interventions were supported by extensive social protection measures designed to assist vulnerable populations, such as food distribution, cash transfers, and utility subsidies (Government of Ghana, 2020; A. Ibrahim, Reference Ibrahim2020). Additionally, Ghana’s vaccination drive reflected a strategically coordinated and locally tailored approach, reinforcing its overall resilience in the face of the pandemic (European External Action Service, 2021; GHS, 2024; WHO, 2022). According to Foucault, such actions constituted attempts to maximize the population’s health, life, longevity, and strength. The state’s sovereignty was no longer limited to land and what it generates but extended to include additional responsibilities for people’s bodies and actions (Baldwin, Reference Baldwin2005). The movement of people’s bodies became a major concern because “the virus moves when the people move.” Lockdowns and social distancing became important items in the toolbox in responding to the virus. With the shift from traditional sovereignty, “political power took over care of the biological life of the entire social body” (Foucault, Reference Foucault and Macey2003).
As Salter (Reference Salter2006) writes, “The history of the body politics is inextricably intertwined with the history of the political body.” This statement concisely encapsulates Foucault’s conception of biopolitics (Foucault, Reference Foucault, Ewald, Fontana and Senellart2009). Foucault contends that modern states are increasingly fascinated with the confluence of power and human biology, to the point where human health has begun to play a part in conceptions of power, ultimately becoming a type of power itself (Foucault, Reference Foucault and Sheridan1977). State power increasingly shifted from governing bodies as juridical subjects to administering them as biological life. In Ghana, the population was addressed less as a collection of political citizens than as a biological aggregate whose health, conduct, and vitality required regulation. Through the promotion of practices such as handwashing and social distancing, the state sought to discipline everyday behavior in the name of collective well-being. These dynamics illustrate how Ghana’s pandemic response cannot be fully understood through conventional models of biopolitics derived from Western contexts. Instead, it reflects a form of governance in which the regulation of life is mediated by economic necessity, social structure, and political negotiation. The Ghanaian case thus demonstrates that biopolitics is not a uniform or universally applied framework, but a context-dependent practice shaped by the conditions under which life must be sustained. This reinforces the need to conceptualize biopolitics as plural and situated, rather than as a singular model of governance.
Immunization through vaccination
In many high-income countries, COVID-19 vaccination campaigns were organized through centralized procurement systems, advanced cold-chain infrastructure, and large-scale digital registration platforms. These systems enabled rapid population-wide immunization while reinforcing existing forms of technocratic governance over health (Foucault, Reference Foucault, Senellart, Ewald and Fontana2007). Vaccination in these contexts functioned as a key biopolitical instrument through which states sought to optimize population health, regulate risk, and restore economic activity.
In Ghana, however, the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines unfolded under markedly different conditions. Although the country was the first recipient of vaccines through the COVAX facility, spearheaded by GAVI, WHO, and UNICEF (GAVI, 2021). Access remained shaped by global inequalities in vaccine distribution. Initial supply constraints, combined with logistical and infrastructural limitations, required a phased and adaptive approach to immunization. Moreover, vaccine hesitancy emerged as a significant challenge, fueled by misinformation, distrust of foreign interventions, and circulating narratives about depopulation and infertility (Abbasi, Reference Abbasi2022; Manu et al., Reference Manu, Douglas, Kushitor, Komesuor, Ampomah and Opoku2024; Winters et al., Reference Winters, Christie, Melchinger, Iddrisu, Al Hassan, Ewart, Mosley, Alhassan, Shani, Nyamuame, Lepage, Thomson, Atif and Omer2025).
These dynamics reveal a form of biopolitical governance that extends beyond the technical administration of immunity. In Ghana, vaccination became a site where biological, political, and social anxieties intersected. Public health efforts relied not only on biomedical infrastructure but also on sustained public education campaigns, moral persuasion, and community engagement. Through these strategies, the state sought to “make live” not simply by distributing vaccines, but by cultivating trust and compliance in a context shaped by historical inequalities and global power asymmetries.
Vaccination became a contentious issue during the COVID-19 pandemic as the crisis itself became increasingly politicized. Misinformation in the media ignited mistrust and suspicion regarding immunization (Samarasekera, Reference Samarasekera2021). There was a prevailing narrative that the COVID-19 pandemic was intentionally planned by foreign actors to depopulate Africa and that the vaccines themselves were intended to cause infertility (Abbasi, Reference Abbasi2022; Manu et al., Reference Manu, Douglas, Kushitor, Komesuor, Ampomah and Opoku2024; Population Matters, 2023; Winters et al., Reference Winters, Christie, Melchinger, Iddrisu, Al Hassan, Ewart, Mosley, Alhassan, Shani, Nyamuame, Lepage, Thomson, Atif and Omer2025). These concerns were further amplified by widely publicized comments suggesting that vaccines be tested on African populations (BBC, 2023). While routine childhood immunization had historically been accepted in Ghana, COVID-19 vaccines were received with greater skepticism, reflecting broader anxieties about global inequality and biomedical experimentation. As part of the broader circulation of conspiracy narratives concerning the safety and side effects of COVID-19 vaccines, a coach of a Ghanaian Premier League football team publicly attributed the team’s loss in a match to diminished physical performance allegedly resulting from players’ recent COVID-19 vaccinations (Lohiniva et al., Reference Lohiniva, Nurzhynska, Hudi, Anim and Aboagye2022). Despite these challenges, Ghana’s vaccination campaign demonstrated a capacity for adaptive governance through sustained public education and strategic coordination. Ghana vaccinated over 13 million people by the end of March 2022 (WHO, 2022), a number that increased to 28,515,854 by December 31, 2023 (GHS, 2024).
Within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ghana, immunity transcended science and biology and became intrinsically intertwined with politics. The politicization of the coronavirus pandemic underscored the inherently political nature of immunization. As a biological phenomenon, immunity is intricately intertwined with everyday life and is critical for individual survival, as evidenced by the responses to the coronavirus pandemic (Owen, Reference Owen2020). As Foucault (Reference Foucault, Senellart, Ewald and Fontana2007) suggests in his discourse on smallpox in the era of liberalism, vaccination operates as a central biopolitical strategy through which states seek to regulate life by managing biological risk. However, in Ghana, this process was mediated by competing narratives of trust, sovereignty, and global inequality. Immunization thus became a form of “governing through immunity” (Ajana, Reference Ajana2021). The development of “immunity passports” made biology the determining factor in one’s eligibility for certain benefits, and this contributed to further blurring of the boundaries (Kalpokas, Reference Kalpokas2020). By deliberately introducing controlled doses of pathogens, the government aimed to make life live, encapsulating the concept of biopolitics. It is worth noting that immunity was initially applied in the juridical field as a means to grant exemption from duty or service until it was later applied to the self-defense processes of the body in the medical field (Cohen, Reference Cohen2009; Davis et al., Reference Davis, Flowers, Lohm, Waller and Stephenson2016). Immunity became a social and political metaphor for the separation of biological life from political life. Whether the threat is a disease, violence, or a harmful message, it always exists on the border between inside and outside, between the self and the other, and between the individual and the community (Esposito, Reference Esposito2011).
In response to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ghanaian government established the National Vaccine Institute. An initial significant investment of $25 million was allocated to this institute to coordinate and enhance the capabilities of local pharmaceutical companies in manufacturing mRNA vaccines for COVID-19, malaria, and tuberculosis (Ministry of Health, 2023). This initiative illustrates how Ghana’s pandemic response extended beyond immediate crisis management toward longer term strategies of biopolitical sovereignty, seeking to reduce dependence on external actors in the governance of life and health.
Biosurveillance and securitization of health
In many high-income countries, biosurveillance during the COVID-19 pandemic relied on advanced digital infrastructures, including mobile tracking applications, centralized data systems, and algorithmic monitoring of population movement. These technologies enabled states to govern risk through real-time data collection and predictive modeling, reinforcing forms of technocratic and surveillance-based biopolitics (Sylvia, Reference Sylvia2020). Such approaches assumed high levels of digital penetration, institutional trust, and administrative capacity.
In Ghana, biosurveillance operated through a more hybrid system that combined digital tools with community-based monitoring and public communication strategies. While the government introduced technological innovations such as mobile tracking applications and data systems, these were complemented by localized practices of surveillance embedded in social relations and public messaging. The pandemic thus did not simply expand technological surveillance but reshaped existing forms of social regulation and collective responsibility. This divergence reflects a distinct biopolitical logic in which surveillance is not solely imposed through centralized systems but is diffused across society. In this context, governing life involves both technological monitoring and the cultivation of self-regulating subjects, which highlights the interplay between state authority and social compliance.
COVID-19 increasingly became framed not only as a public health issue but also as a matter of national and global security. The pandemic generated pervasive fear and uncertainty, which prompted security-oriented framings typically associated with conventional threats. However, unlike traditional security threats, the threat from the virus could not be deterred through military surveillance, coercive force, or rhetorical mobilization. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, President George W. Bush encouraged Americans to go about their normal lives, work, travel, and board airplanes (Feaver, Reference Feaver2013). Similarly, French President François Hollande led marches to demonstrate public defiance, resilience, and solidarity after the attack on Charlie Hebdo in France in 2015 (BBC, 2015a). COVID-19 required a distinct kind of solidarity that differed from those associated with conventional security threats. Resilience was expressed not through public assembly or routine social activity, but through withdrawal from everyday interactions. To be resilient, then, was to be locked down and stay home or risk being labelled a threat to state security. Stefan Elbe’s work on the health-security nexus helps clarify this transformation. For Elbe, the securitization of infectious disease is neither simply beneficial nor inherently repressive; rather, it generates a normative dilemma (Elbe, Reference Elbe2006). On the one hand, framing disease as a security issue can elevate public health threats onto the agenda of the state, mobilize resources, and justify rapid intervention in moments of biological crisis. On the other hand, the same framing may authorize exceptional measures, expand surveillance, privilege national security institutions, and narrow the space for democratic contestation (Elbe, Reference Elbe2006, Reference Elbe2011). Securitization, therefore, changes not only how disease is governed, but also what kinds of political responses become thinkable and legitimate (Elbe, Reference Elbe2011).
This dilemma is central to Ghana’s COVID-19 response. The securitization of the pandemic enabled the government to treat viral transmission as a threat to collective survival, thereby legitimizing contact tracing, emergency restrictions, border controls, and digital monitoring. Yet these measures were not simply expressions of coercive state power. They were also embedded in a discourse of care, protection, and public responsibility. Elbe’s approach is, therefore, useful because it avoids reducing pandemic securitization either to necessary public health action or to authoritarian overreach. Instead, it shows how health security operates as an ambivalent field in which life-preserving interventions may simultaneously expand the state’s capacity to classify, monitor, and regulate populations (Elbe, Reference Elbe2006, Reference Elbe2018).
Giorgio Agamben’s critique of the COVID-19 response is useful for identifying the danger that emergency measures may become normalized as routine techniques of governance, particularly through the securitization of populations, bodies, and infected spaces (Agamben, Reference Agamben2020a, Reference Agamben2020c). However, this paper does not adopt Agamben’s stronger claim that pandemic restrictions were simply disproportionate to the real threat of the virus, nor does it treat Ghana’s response as analogous to totalitarian rule. Instead, Agamben is engaged here as a warning about the political afterlives of emergency powers rather than as the theoretical basis for evaluating the proportionality of Ghana’s pandemic response.
The Ghanaian case points to a more ambivalent form of biopolitical governance. Emergency measures such as contact tracing, movement restrictions, digital monitoring, and public health communication expanded the state’s authority over biological and social life, but they were also articulated through a discourse of care, protection, and collective survival. The issue, therefore, is not that Ghana’s COVID-19 response simply reproduced an authoritarian state of exception, but that it blurred the boundary between care and control. This distinction is central to the argument of this paper: pandemic governance in Ghana operated through negotiated and adaptive forms of biopower shaped by infrastructural constraints, informal livelihoods, public trust, and the need to preserve life under conditions of uncertainty.
Žižek’s concern about “human-faced barbarism” similarly captures the ethical unease generated by pandemic restrictions, especially where public health protection required the suspension or modification of ordinary forms of sociality (Žižek, Reference Žižek2020). Yet, in Ghana, these concerns must be situated within a context where state action was not merely coercive but also oriented toward preventing health-system collapse, sustaining public legitimacy, and maintaining social cooperation. The analytical task, therefore, is not to determine whether Ghana confirms Agamben’s diagnosis, but to show how emergency health measures can simultaneously protect life, discipline conduct, and generate infrastructures of surveillance whose uses may extend beyond the original health crisis.
The measures used to contain the virus brought the government’s biopolitical practices into a much sharper focus than before, as they created avenues for enhanced surveillance, particularly when such mechanisms differentiated across sections of the population (Sylvia, Reference Sylvia2020). The dread of the pandemic created a sense of insecurity in many facets of life, including alterations in interpersonal relationships (Santos et al., Reference Santos, Rodrigues and Oliveira2022). The COVID-19 pandemic produced forms of surveillance that resembled the disciplinary logic of the Panopticon. Bentham’s eighteenth-century model of the Panopticon described a prison structure in which inmates could be observed from a central watchtower without knowing when they were actually under observation (Bentham, Reference Bentham and Bozovic1787/1995; Foucault, Reference Foucault and Sheridan1977). This uncertainty encouraged self-regulation, as individuals modified their behavior in response to the possibility of being watched. In the context of public health during COVID-19, the concept is used metaphorically to describe how governments employed tools such as internet monitoring, mobile tracking applications, and digital data collection to monitor people’s behaviors, movements, and online activities in ways that encouraged compliance. In a manner consistent with the Panopticon effect, many Ghanaians adapted to the “new normal” by internalizing government-recommended behaviors, thereby conforming without the need for overt coercion. In Ghana, this Panopticon-inspired model of surveillance extended beyond the carceral metaphor to permeate various spheres of social life as part of the state’s COVID-19 response. A nationwide phone survey conducted in April 2020 by the Partnership for Evidence-Based Response to COVID-19 (PERC) revealed that 89% of Ghanaians expressed satisfaction with the government’s management of the pandemic (PERC, 2020). A comparative analysis conducted by the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (2021) demonstrated that, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ghana displayed notably high levels of institutional trust, with approximately 70% of the population expressing confidence in the presidency and around 84% perceiving the state as legitimate. A high level of trust in official communication likely played an important role in encouraging people to follow public health guidelines during the pandemic, as approximately 90% of respondents in a PERC survey reported trust in government-provided information regarding COVID-19 (PERC, 2020). By late 2021, trust in the government had translated into relatively high vaccine acceptance rates in Ghana (Afrobarometer, 2023), outpacing several African peers (Afrobarometer, 2021) and showing that legitimacy in a specific policy area can maintain public cooperation despite wider disillusionment. In 2022, Afrobarometer reported that 76% of Ghanaians rated the government’s handling of COVID-19 as “fairly well” or “very well” (Afrobarometer, 2022), which suggests that public support for the government’s pandemic response remained substantial even 2 years after the crisis began.
The government of Ghana increasingly used data to enforce social distancing measures. The use of location data was the most common method of data collection (Sylvia, Reference Sylvia2020). Increased access to the internet and various communication channels and devices provided new prospects for surveillance that led to a significant increase in social control (Briggs & Nichter, Reference Briggs and Nichter2009). Ghana was among the first countries to use PanaBios when it began easing restrictions at its borders (Yeboah, Reference Yeboah2020). PanaBios is a continent-wide digital platform supported by the African Union, designed to monitor cross-border transmission and link COVID-19 testing facilities across Africa. This enabled Ghanaian authorities to verify the validity of test results presented at points of entry. Ghana enacted new legislation authorizing the President to exercise emergency powers to combat the pandemic by requiring telecom companies to provide personal customer information to track the contacts of people with coronavirus cases using a COVID-19 Tracker App (Dzawu, Reference Dzawu2020).
The passage of Executive Instruments (EIs) such as the Imposition of Restrictions Act, 2020 (Act 1012) gave the government new powers to impose various forms of emergency restrictions. Ghana’s legal response to COVID-19 raised valid constitutional and human rights concerns (Appiagyei-Atua, Reference Appiagyei-Atua2020), which culminated in the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against the Imposition of Restrictions Act (Amoako, Reference Amoako2023). The Court found that the law allowed the President to impose restrictions without defining what constituted an “emergency,” relative to constitutional safeguards embedded in Articles 31–32 of Ghana’s Constitution (Addadzi-Koom, Reference Addadzi-Koom2023). Yet, even considering this ruling, intentionality matters. There is a significant distinction between a legally flawed response and a deliberate strategy to consolidate authoritarian power. The government’s legal misstep was a consequence of the tensions and uncertainties inherent in emergency policymaking during a global health crisis. This legislative route was, rather, a flexible legal response that allowed for time-bound, issue-specific restrictions without fully suspending constitutional protections (Agyeman-Budu, Reference Agyeman-Budu2020). There is insufficient evidence to conclude that the government deliberately used the pandemic as a cover to strengthen executive powers. The available data, political conduct, and continued operation of democratic institutions suggest that Ghana’s approach, however imperfect, was driven by public health necessity rather than autocratic intent. President Nana Akufo-Addo consistently adopted a rhetoric of unity, protection, and urgency, asserting that “we will therefore protect people’s lives, then their livelihoods” (Kwame et al., Reference Kwame, Makarova, Hudu and Petrucka2023). The government’s practical actions aligned with this messaging. The government implemented a limited three-week partial lockdown and provided social relief such as free meals and water (Kwame et al., Reference Kwame, Makarova, Hudu and Petrucka2023), while ensuring that parliament and the judiciary remained operational (Agyeman-Budu, Reference Agyeman-Budu2020; Sibiri et al., Reference Sibiri, Prah and Zankawah2021). The emergency law was not accompanied by mass arrests of opposition figures, suspension of elections (Repucci & Slipowitz, Reference Repucci and Slipowitz2020), or militarization of civilian institutions, hallmarks of pandemic-driven authoritarianism seen elsewhere (Swan, Reference Swan2020). Furthermore, the Imposition of Restrictions Act itself passed through parliamentary processes and was publicly debated, even if flawed in its constitutional grounding (Gakpo, Reference Gakpo2020). This is supported by survey data showing that the executive did not attempt to suspend normal political processes or sideline democratic accountability entirely (Freedom House, 2020, 2021; V-Dem Institute, 2022).
Ghanaians were open to accepting some restrictions on freedom in terms of movement (PERC, 2020). In a few isolated cases, the government found it necessary to deploy police and military personnel to enforce the temporary closure of churches and theatres, as well as to ensure compliance with social distancing measures in marketplaces and on public beaches (Afrobarometer, 2023; Dzordzormenyoh & Ahadzie, Reference Dzordzormenyoh and Ahadzie2025; S. Ibrahim, Reference Ibrahim2020). While many people agreed that the government should use security forces to restrict movement, with 76% approving such measures (Afrobarometer, 2023), others opposed the use of surveillance technology to monitor their movements (Gawu & Mensah, Reference Gawu and Mensah2021). The use of technology for population governance in Ghana did not necessarily follow a top-down, authoritarian model reminiscent of a “Big Brother.” In contrast to China’s mandatory health code app (Liang, Reference Liang2020), many of the pandemic-induced surveillance practices in Ghana relied on voluntary consent from the people, with assurances of safety and eventual return to pre-pandemic norms. Individuals voluntarily opted to install these apps on their devices to receive notifications concerning their potential exposure to the virus. Arguably, the adoption of such technologies was not primarily aimed at increasing state authority, given that tracking and surveillance systems were already pervasive in the daily lives of Ghanaians prior to the pandemic. Various private, commercial, and governmental institutions had long employed diverse surveillance mechanisms to monitor, track, and gather data (Nweke & Francis, Reference Nweke and Francis2024; Paalo et al., Reference Paalo, Degraft Arthur, Dramani and Adu-Gyamfi2024) without evidence of significant suspicion or resistance from the people.
In Ghana, as elsewhere, during the pandemic emergency, most people were willing to make some sacrifices (PERC, 2020) to avoid the dangers of sickness and death. Elsewhere, people were prepared to avoid others (PERC, 2020) and even ignore what happens to the dead bodies of their loved ones (Agamben, Reference Agamben2020c). As populations became more amenable to living this way in order to avoid sickness or death (Antonini et al., Reference Antonini, Genie, Attwell, Attema, Ward, Melegaro, Torbica, Kelly, Berardi, Sequeira, McGregor, Kellner, Brammli-Greenberg, Hinwood, Murauskienė, Behmane, Balogh, Hagen and Paolucci2025; Lazarus et al., Reference Lazarus, Ratzan, Palayew, Gostin, Larson, Rabin, Kimball and El-Mohandes2021; SteelFisher et al., Reference SteelFisher, Findling, Caporello, Sutton, Dewhurst, Evans and Castrucci2024), what will become of human relations and society whose only value is survival? Some critical accounts, notably Agamben’s reflections in Clarifications, raise concerns about whether prolonged emergency conditions can narrow political and social life into a preoccupation with biological survival devoid of social, political, compassionate, and emotional dimensions (Agamben, Reference Agamben2020b). In this paper, however, that concern is treated as a caution rather than as a diagnosis of Ghana’s COVID-19 response.
Agamben’s reflections on the loss of intimacy, friendship, proximity, and ordinary social life during COVID-19 are useful for raising the question of what happens when biological security becomes the dominant measure of collective existence (Agamben, Reference Agamben2020c). However, this paper does not adopt Agamben’s stronger suggestion that pandemic health security was merely fictitious or fear-driven. Such a reading risks reducing public health interventions to instruments of domination and obscures the genuine epidemiological uncertainties, institutional pressures, and public health obligations that shaped state responses. As Peters (Reference Peters2020) and Nancy (Reference Nancy2020) suggest, Agamben’s critique has often been read as an overstatement of state control, especially where governments were responding to a real and rapidly evolving biological threat.
The relevance of Agamben for this paper is, therefore, more limited and more specific because his work helps identify the danger that emergency measures may normalize the reduction of political and social life to biological survival. Yet Ghana’s case cannot be understood simply through this diagnosis. Ghana’s COVID-19 response was not only a project of restriction or domination; it was also framed and experienced as an effort to preserve life, prevent health-system collapse, and sustain public trust under conditions of uncertainty. The central issue, therefore, is not whether Ghana confirms Agamben’s account of totalizing biosecurity, but how pandemic governance blurred the line between care and control. As De Carolis notes, biological life is inseparable from exposure to illness, just as social life necessarily involves the risk of transmission (De Carolis, Reference De Carolis2020). The Ghanaian case thus raises a more precise biopolitical question: how can states protect life during a public health emergency without allowing the infrastructures of protection, surveillance, and restriction to outlive the crisis or diminish the social relations that make life meaningful?
Ghana’s COVID-19 Tracker App relied on telecommunications data to identify individuals infected with COVID-19 and those exposed to confirmed cases, facilitating rapid referral to health authorities. The system also monitored travelers entering Ghana from countries with reported COVID-19 cases. In defense of the COVID-19 Tracker App, the Vice President of Ghana, who was the Daily Monitoring Team Chairman for COVID-19 in Ghana, said, “You cannot fight what you cannot see.” “In the fight against COVID-19, data is our most powerful weapon” (UN/ITU, 2020). COVID-19 should not be understood solely as an epidemiological crisis, as it also generated substantial national security concerns. This makes it imperative to critically evaluate the expansion of health surveillance mechanisms in Ghana and their implications for population rights. Executive Instrument 63, which allowed the government to collect personal data of telephone subscribers pursuant to the Electronic Communications Act, 2008 (Act 775), was unsuccessfully challenged in the High Court in Accra (Dzawu, Reference Dzawu2020). COVID-19 contact tracing technologies functioned as mechanisms through which the state exercised biopower over the population. By digitally monitoring individuals’ movements, interactions, and health status, the state extended its capacity to regulate bare life. Such measures exemplify biopolitics because they shift governance from overt coercion to the subtle management of biological existence, where authorities track who is infected, who is at risk, and who must be isolated. In this way, the state asserted control not only over space and mobility but also over the intimate rhythms of everyday life, embedding surveillance within the pursuit of collective health. This is where the argument departs most clearly from Agamben, since the central issue is not whether public health measures were merely a pretext for domination, but how life-preserving interventions can simultaneously expand the state’s capacity to classify, monitor, and regulate populations. The use of these technologies thus illustrates how public health imperatives became instruments for governing populations, which blurs the line between care and control.
Generally, Ghana’s media environment remained formally uncensored during the pandemic, but internet use was subject to more subtle forms of monitoring. While online platforms enabled citizens to access information and engage with public health discourse, this apparent empowerment often amounted to a limited and conditional form of agency. The same digital infrastructures that facilitated information circulation also intensified state capacity for surveillance and social regulation. Increased reliance on communication technologies and online platforms widened the scope for monitoring population behavior, information flows, and compliance with COVID-19 measures. Rather than merely enabling participation, digital connectivity functioned as a biopolitical instrument through which authorities could observe, manage, and normalize conduct, thereby reinforcing asymmetries of power between the state and the population. What websites were visited by the population, and what kind of health information was circulated (Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs, 2021; Lohiniva et al., Reference Lohiniva, Nurzhynska, Hudi, Anim and Aboagye2022)?
While that unseen interaction between officials and the population created Panopticon-like surveillance (Briggs & Nichter, Reference Briggs and Nichter2009), the internet also provided inverse Synopticon-like surveillance of state activities by the population. The term Synopticon was popularized by Thomas Mathiesen (Reference Mathiesen1997) in his discussion of modern media and surveillance, where mass media technologies allow large audiences to observe and scrutinize the actions of powerful individuals or institutions. In a synopticon-like arrangement, surveillance is not only top-down (state over citizens) but also horizontally or bottom-up, as citizens use digital platforms, social media, and mobile devices to monitor leaders or each other. While government agencies monitored infection rates and enforced restrictions, ordinary citizens also participated in observing and policing compliance. Social media platforms, particularly Facebook and Twitter, became spaces where “the many watched the few” (Mathiesen, Reference Mathiesen1997). Citizens shared photos and videos of individuals, including public officials, who violated mask mandates, flouted gathering limits, or ignored lockdown rules (Kwame et al., Reference Kwame, Makarova, Hudu and Petrucka2023). This complemented biopolitical governance by enlisting “the many” in the monitoring of “the few” who were also perceived as jeopardizing public health. In this sense, synopticon-like monitoring functioned as a social extension of Ghana’s biopolitical governance, blurring the line between official state surveillance and citizen-driven enforcement. For instance, the Minister of Health came under public scrutiny after online disclosures revealed documentation of a US$2.85 million payment to Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum of the United Arab Emirates, an intermediary involved in the controversial procurement of 3.4 million doses of the Sputnik V vaccine. The Minister of Health had earlier denied knowledge of any payment when he testified before an ad hoc Committee of Parliament, where he had said, “to the best of my knowledge, we have not done any payment” (MyJoyOnline, 2021). Key actors involved in managing the COVID-19 response were increasingly cautious about media scrutiny that could expose misconduct or controversial decisions. As argued by Thomas Mathiesen, surveillance has developed beyond Foucault’s view of the Panopticon model (Mathiesen, Reference Mathiesen1997).
Beyond the pandemic, these tactics could continue (Solanki & Gisselquist, Reference Solanki and Gisselquist2020), potentially expanding to include spying on political opponents and stifling dissent. As a result, the pandemic has profoundly altered how information services are delivered. Yuval Noah Harari speculates in the Financial Times:
As a thought experiment, consider a hypothetical government that demands that every citizen wears a biometric bracelet that monitors body temperature and heart rate 24 hours a day. The resulting data is hoarded and analyzed by government algorithms. The algorithms will know that you are sick even before you know it, and they will also know where you have been and whom you have met (Harari, Reference Harari2020).
Viewed from this perspective, pandemic conditions can lead populations to accept forms of surveillance that would otherwise provoke resistance. For Foucault, biopolitical power is not inherently repressive but operates as a mutable and contingent force shaped by historical and situational contexts. Examining the potential risks of such surveillance practices, and their longer-term effects on processes of population subjectivation, is, therefore, critical. As COVID-19 has become less life-threatening and the emergency phase of the pandemic has ended, both authoritarian and democratic governments may continue to employ surveillance measures to control populations (Sylvia, Reference Sylvia2020).
As Solanki and Gisselquist (Reference Solanki and Gisselquist2020) caution, a central risk is that surveillance infrastructures introduced during the pandemic may persist beyond the crisis and become embedded in routine population governance. The continued use of such technologies raises significant concerns about their long-term implications for democratic institutions and civil liberties. Ghanaians must either accept that the newfound biopolitical power over the securitized body is the new normal or reject its possible intrusiveness and the idea that the body can be governed without risk (Kalpokas, Reference Kalpokas2020).
Conclusion
This study employed a Foucauldian biopolitical framework to examine Ghana’s COVID-19 response, showing how state interventions operated at the intersection of public health, political authority, and the governance of life. Measures such as lockdowns, surveillance, vaccination, and quarantine functioned not only to curb viral transmission but also to regulate social and political life. Ghana’s approach maintained relatively high levels of public trust and institutional stability, despite significant economic disruption (McKeown, Reference McKeown2026b).
The findings contribute to the provincialization of biopolitics by demonstrating that governance in the Global South operates through logics distinct from Western models. In Ghana, biopolitical power emerged through adaptive and negotiated practices shaped by infrastructural limitations, informal economies, and historically embedded state–society relations. Rather than reflecting institutionalized and technologically stabilized systems, pandemic governance unfolded through selective enforcement, improvisation, and hybrid authority structures. Recognizing this duality clarifies how biopolitical governance operates simultaneously as a mechanism of protection and a site of structural inequality in the Global South.
The study also advances debates on biosecurity by showing how global health governance is structured by asymmetrical international arrangements. Ghana’s reliance on external vaccine supply chains illustrates that the capacity to “make live” (Foucault, Reference Foucault2008) is unevenly distributed, revealing biosecurity not as a neutral technical domain but as a site where dependency and global inequality are reproduced. In this sense, COVID-19 governance exposes the biopolitical dimensions of global inequality often overlooked in mainstream International Relations theories of security.
By bringing Foucauldian biopolitics into dialogue with Mbembe’s necropolitics (Mbembe, Reference Mbembe2003), the study advances theorization of crisis governance by highlighting the coexistence of life-preserving and life-abandoning logics within state responses. Ghana’s case demonstrates that even relatively successful pandemic responses can produce necropolitical effects, particularly for informal workers and marginalized populations. This complicates binary distinctions between protection and repression, or democracy and authoritarianism, and instead points to crisis governance as a spectrum of negotiated power under conditions of structural constraint.
More broadly, the findings show that global health crises are not exceptional disruptions but constitutive moments in international politics. Pandemic responses reshape norms of sovereignty, redefine acceptable forms of surveillance, and recalibrate relations between states and international institutions. By foregrounding a Global South case, this paper contributes to efforts within International Relations to pluralize theory, decenter Western experiences, and account for how crises are governed across unequal global contexts.
Overall, the study advances three core theoretical contributions. First, it demonstrates that biopolitics in the Global South operates as a provincialized and context-dependent mode of governance, shaped by infrastructural scarcity, informal economies, and postcolonial state formation, rather than as a derivative extension of Western models. Second, it shows that biopolitical power is adaptive and improvisational, emerging through negotiation between epidemiological imperatives and socioeconomic survival, rather than through fully institutionalized systems. Third, by bringing Foucauldian biopolitics into dialogue with postcolonial theory and necropolitics, the study reconceptualizes pandemic governance as a hybrid regime of power in which life-preserving and life-abandoning logics coexist, structured by both domestic constraints and global inequalities. Pandemic governance in the Global South thus emerges not as a deviation from biopolitics, but as a critical site for rethinking the scope and application of biopolitics.
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The author declares that no external sponsorship, grants, or other financial support was received for the preparation of this manuscript.
Competing interests
The author declares no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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