Disciplinary regime, neo-liberal bio- power and alienation of national sovereignty in Cameroon: Political economy of the imprisoned body

Abstract

This study found out that Cameroon’s national sovereignty and prospects of development were alienated
because globalization came to most African countries in the 1980s as a form of capitalist power with new norms
that humanized disciplinary institutions in the country. It invaded all the vital sectors of the population’s life and
rendered the state apparatus deviant. This power system then enabled proponents of the free market in the west
to deploy expansionist strategies of neoliberal capitalism such as structural adjustment programmes,
deregulation, privatization, good governance, poverty eradication papers and so on. Global bio-power was thus
crafted on claims of provision of social welfare and means of productivity of the people and their safety, as
against state mechanisms of mutilation and surveillance of the body. It was more sensitive to the individual’s
perspective, his human rights, rehabilitation and new knowledge systems of normalization. Global power
decentralized and pluralized the sources of its institutional knowledge so that no single state authority could
have autonomous and self-regulating authority. It co-operated with the Cameroonian subject instead of
contesting his standpoint. It created new ‘scapes, which appeared to empower society while at the same time,
they merely served to expand the legitimacy of neoliberal capitalism. The paper ends with three suggested
strategic policies to contain the ill-effects of globalization.