COVID proves the state will use any excuse to create “others” and target them with violence--the status quo is uniquely a state of proliferated biopolitics.

There is no gainsaying the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating effect on the lives of people all over the world. It has not only led to the loss of lives but has also led to the loss of livelihoods. The response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been diverse in different countries but all pointing to the reality that the human body became the centre of political action towards containing the spread of the virus. Notably, in different locations certain bodies were considered biological threats; for example, the West/the USA saw China as a threat, souring relations between the countries (Christensen 2020); and at some point, in China Africans were seen as biological threats (Castilloa and Amoah 2020; Ngcobo 2021); in South Africa black people/ townships were mostly targeted as biological threats hence the deployment of soldiers to mostly Black populated areas (Bond 2022). These incidents including the numerous restrictive regulations put in place by governments globally to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, necessitate an interrogation of how social beings were governed through discursive practices and disciplinary techniques and use of power. Notably, during COVID-19 two styles/types of power were exercised; repressive and productive power (Barceló et al. 2020; Patterson and Clark 2020). Both kinds of power produced different outcomes and deployed different strategies. The issue then would be to try and investigate how these deployments of different forms of power structured human ways of being during COVID-19.

According to Brown and Gershon (2017: 2) ‘the theme of body politics directs our attention to how bodies are included or excluded in the polity. How do governments respond to the political demands of bodies that transgress normative boundaries? How does the regulation of bodies, or the lack of regulation, impact society?’ The issue has also brought to the fore a revived interest in the interrogation of the nexus between state power and control of the freedom of citizens. Notably, by extension, the control of citizen’s freedom meant the control of the human body through several restrictive acts as already mentioned. The issue has also brought into focus Michel Foucault’s analysis of power and rule in modern and postmodern societies centring on the concept of biopower/biopolitics. Biopolitics concerns the administration of life – it is concerned with issues of life and death, birth and breeding, health and disease (physical and mental), and the procedures geared towards retarding or sustaining life optimisation in societies (Dean 2001; Armstrong 1983: 2-3).