Rather than treat the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank policies as techniques of coercion and domination, Amo- Agyemang insist that the so-called ‘Washington Consensus’ framework of structural adjustment represents a principal biopolitical technology of governance which attempts to discursively legitimise external interventions through the imposition of neoliberal economic agenda; and importantly it is highlighted that there is room for resistance and non-compliance as a form of counter-conduct.

“Central to my exploration is to understand how structural adjustment policies are carefully articulated and orchestrated neoliberal rationalities of governing the purpose of which is to shape the behaviour of the government of Ghana according to a particular set of norms and ideas,” Amo- Agyemang notes.

Amo- Agyemang employed Foucauldian discourse analysis as main methodological inspiration to problematise how power-knowledge nexus dynamically makes it possible to apprehend the ways that neoliberal government are intimately and complexly connected with specific techniques, mechanisms, and projects that seek to govern human subjects.

Research has made visible how governmentality as a general analytical grid of ideas that give form to programmes, techniques, rationalities and strategies of governance, is implicated in the production, reproduction and circulation of power—showing how through banal experiences of everyday life and the most mundane practices which are associated with governance— structural adjustment predictably govern to foster as well as (re)produce specific liberal modalities of subjectivity and social relations necessary to sustain the logic of neoliberalism through biopolitical tactics.

“Following Foucault, in this study I have theorised neoliberalism as a form of politics that achieve its goals discursively by rearticulating our social world and how we ought to be governed,” Amo- Agyemang says.

The research suggests that neoliberalism is not just about free market economy, advocating more markets and “retrenchment” or “demise” of the paternalistic state, but rather a distinctly political rationality that increasingly renders social reality understandable, governable, knowable and intelligible.

Information on the defence

The public examination of MPhil Charles Amo- Agyemang’s doctoral thesis Understanding Neoliberalism as Governmenty: A Case Study of The IMF and World Bank Structural Adjustment Regime in Ghana will take place in the Faculty of Social Sciences on Thursday, 11 May 2017, at 12 noon, in Lecture Hall 3, Yliopistonkatu 8, Rovaniemi. The Opponent will be Professor David Chandler of the University of Westminster, and the Custos Professor Julian Reid of the University of Lapland.

Information on the doctoral candidate

Amo- Agyemang Charles, born 1973 in Kumasi- Ghana, graduated from Kumasi High School in 1995. He has studied Political Science with Philosophy at the University of Ghana. He earned his Master’s degree in Political Sciences at the University of Ghana in 2007. Amo- Agyemang has worked as a Graduate Assistant at Political Science Department at University of Ghana from 2004 to 2006. He has also worked as a Research Assistant and lecturer at Political Science Department at University of Ghana and lecturer at West End University College.

Further information

+358469615995
camoagyemang@yahoo.com

Sale of the dissertation: verkkokauppa Juvenes. Further information and press release copies are available at the Lapland University Press, phone: +358 40 821 4242, email: julkaisu (at) ulapland.fi

Publication data

Amo- Agyemang Charles: Understanding Neoliberalism as Govermentality. A case of IMF and World Bank Structural Adjustment Regime in Ghana. Acta Universitatis Lapponiensis 346. Lapland University Press. Rovaniemi. 2017. ISBN (paper format) 978-952-484-984-5, ISSN 0788-7604. Web version (pdf): Acta electronica Universitatis Lapponiensis. 214. ISBN 978-952-484-985-2. ISSN 1796-6310.