Premium content
Access to this content requires a subscription. You must be a premium user to view this content.
technical paper
Under the Emperor’s Watch: Combatting the Epidemic amidst a Pandemic-Governmentality Revisited
keywords:
governmentality
ethnicity
surveillance
The outbreak and the consequent responses to the novel coronavirus have, among other things, exposed persistent surreptitious acts and arts of governmental injustices against ethnic/racial minorities. As the COVID-19 surges, governments across the world adopted and deployed international and country-specific health protocol and policy directives to effectively fight the pandemic. These acts and arts of governments, however, brought into the limelight the plight of marginalized ethnic/racial minorities whose existence the dominant society considers a threat to the advancement of their national agenda, and are, therefore, treated as an epidemic. On the one hand, governmental intensification of surveillance of these objectified social entities under the pretense of combatting the COVID-19 pandemic could no longer go unnoticed. On the other hand, the ethnic/racial minorities must contend multiple vulnerabilities of victimization and governmental monitoring, ethnic/racial profiling, and brutalities coupled with the threats and debilitating effects of the pandemic. Using data gathered through observation, the electronic and print media including some social media outlets, this paper employs the Foucauldian concepts of governmentality and surveillance to analyzes nationalist’s deployment of governmental machinery against the Ewe ethnic minority in Ghana at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that while scholarly and non-scholarly attention is largely focused on the identity politics of racism at the global level, ethnically based identity politics and related atrocities at the local level are much alive and do deserve our timely interventions.