The Rejuvenation of the Withering Nation State and Bio-power: The New Dynamics of Human Interaction

The outbreak of COVID-19 comes at the time when a shrinking public sector healthcare is an acknowledged fact in post-colonial societies. The policies adopted by the apparatus of most nation states for the past thirty years or more reveal that providing healthcare to all sections of societies is not a priority. The gradual process of economic liberalization has established "market" as the only legitimate mechanism of the distribution of goods/services as per the efficiency principle. The financial markets are globalized in such a manner that nation states are constantly losing their capacity to perform redistributive functions. State withdrawal from the provision of welfare rights is undermining its moral authority to impose any normative imperative to the people who are being left alone at the mercy of market forces. But the spread of COVID-19 on a global scale has provided an opportunity to the nation state. With the help of healthcare systems, the State has reasserted itself as the ultimate archangel to define human beings and their respective status in the newly emerging nomenclature of the public sphere. In this paper, the rejuvenation of the nation state with respect to bio-power will be discussed in the postcolonial context.