Biopolitical Governance in Postcolonial West Africa: The Management of Life in ECOWAS Migration and Health Policies Between 2000 and 2023

Regional organizations have meaningfully played key roles in the establishment of peace and nation-relation’s building between states. In May 1975, ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) was founded. The structures of such organizations have raised questions about the management of people’s lives and recognition. Recognition and management of lives remain key elements in the formation of West African regional and subregional governing. Political rationality, biopolitics, and the techniques of targeting people’s lives, biopower are two acknowledged studies areas explored in the explorations of human life and its management. In reference to bodies, population, biopower, and rationalization and strategies of governance, for biopolitics, peoples, nations and spaces are to be managed, controlled and surveilled. In postcolonial Africa, with the recognition of new nations after the colonial period, in the name of sovereignty and independence, West African states collaborated to make a union and people’s movement easy. Migration has since 1979 been recognized as a system of state borders’ control and surveillance. The recent disease’s spread of Ebola and COVID-19 have occasioned a new organization regarding health issues and policy. In this paper, we seek to evaluate governmental configuration of ECOWAS regarding biopolitics. This paper is an examination of the ECOWAS official documents dealing with health and migration issues between 2000 and 2023.