Description

As the COVID-19 pandemic developed, government after government imposed strategies of control to contain the SARS-CoV-2 virus. These strategies of control recursively produce what we call “governing through contagion.” Concerned with the administration and politics of strategies of control to combat contagious diseases, governing through contagion produces and emerges from a web of human and non-human relationships. Flexing power over life, governing through contagion regulates a population to ensure subjects’ bodies are free from contagion, do not spread contagion to fellow subjects, and stay economically productive, or at least, not economically damaging. Such power over life comprises multiple interlocking modalities of power – juridical, disciplinary, and security. Each of the three modalities deploys law and other technologies to achieve particular results, but the paramountcy of governing through contagion is the goal of the third modality – security outcomes, which are almost always economic objectives that legitimize a political order. In this conceptual paper, we introduce three themes of governing through contagion: centralization and technology of law, normalization and technologies of moralization, and inter/dysconnectedness and the rearticulation of difference. Our analysis is anchored in our larger historical ethnography of colonial empires and post-colonies, but in this paper we illustrate the concept using one post-colony, Singapore, situated in three socio-legal contexts: the colonial era (particularly 1868-1915), the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome outbreak, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the three themes may vary in relevance or degree elsewhere, we offer them as future research directions on governing through contagion.

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