scholarly journals COVID-19 and Power in Global Health

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Patterson ◽  
Mary A. Clark
Keyword(s):  
Global Health ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Significant Loss ◽  
Structural Power ◽  
Health Security ◽  
Health And Human Rights ◽  
Health Politics ◽  
Conditioned Responses ◽  
Issue Frames

Political scientists bring important tools to the analysis of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, particularly a focus on the crucial role of power in global health politics. We delineate different kinds of power at play during the COVID-19 crisis, showing how a dearth of compulsory, institutional, and epistemic power undermined global cooperation and fueled the pandemic, with its significant loss to human life and huge economic toll. Through the pandemic response, productive and structural power became apparent, as issue frames stressing security and then preserving livelihoods overwhelmed public health and human rights considerations. Structural power rooted in economic inequalities between and within countries conditioned responses and shaped vulnerabilities, as the crisis threatened to deepen power imbalances along multiple lines. Calls for global health security will surely take on a new urgency in the aftermath of the pandemic and the forms of power delineated here will shape their outcome.

Globalisation and the Politics of Global Health

2018 ◽  
pp. 36-58
Author(s):  
Matthew Sparke
Keyword(s):  
Global Health ◽  
Economic Integration ◽  
Structural Violence ◽  
Market Forces ◽  
Global Health Governance ◽  
Global Public Health ◽  
Health Governance ◽  
Health Security ◽  
Health Politics ◽  
Political Economic

This chapter examines how the politics of global health have been shaped by globalisation. This means evaluating its effects on both the material level of political-economic integration and on the ideational level of political-cultural discourse. The former is conventionally tied through a focus on trade and travel to global public health security, and the latter is often associated with global humanitarian care. Going beyond this dualistic divide, however, this chapter argues that globalisation has spun a connective thread running through both regimes. This connective thread is the pro-market neo-liberal governance that sutures globalisation’s integrative and ideational dynamics with powerful binding implications for health. Due to these ties that bind, processes of neo-liberalisation deeply influence global health, creating global health vulnerabilities and problems through structural violence while also shaping and steering the delivery of global health responses. Global health governance remains influenced by other international and postcolonial health regimes that continue to inspire alternatives to the global expansion of neo-liberal norms. However, the same market forces that have made globalisation a synonym for processes of neo-liberalisation have also now become the dominant transnational influence shaping the ‘global’ in global health politics.

States, Nonstate Actors, and Economics in Global Health Governance

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Youde
Keyword(s):  
Global Health ◽  
Global Health Governance ◽  
Development Programs ◽  
Nonstate Actors ◽  
Health Governance ◽  
Health Politics ◽  
Past Generation ◽  
Economic Landscape ◽  
Economic Engagement

The economic landscape for global health politics has shifted dramatically over the past generation as private and nonstate actors become increasingly important sources of development assistance for health. The growing economic clout of nonstate actors in the global health space raises questions about the role of states in funding development programs, whether state and nonstate actors work in a complementary fashion, and if there are fundamental shifts in the nature of global governance, legitimacy, and authority under way. This chapter examines the intersection of state and nonstate actors in the economic dimensions of global health governance by examining the different types of nonstate actors getting involved in funding global health programs, the historical experience of nonstate actors in global health, the informal division of labor within global health governance, and potential pathways for facilitating positive economic engagement between state and nonstate actors in the economics of global health.

scholarly journals The Role of Noncommunicable Diseases in the Pursuit of Global Health Security

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deliana Kostova ◽  
Patricia Richter ◽  
Gretchen Van Vliet ◽  
Michael Mahar ◽  
Ronald L. Moolenaar
Keyword(s):  
Global Health ◽  
Noncommunicable Diseases ◽  
Global Health Security ◽  
Health Security

From Threat to Risk? Exceptionalism and Logics of Health Security

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 266-276
Author(s):  
Jessica Kirk
Keyword(s):  
Global Health ◽  
West Africa ◽  
The Other ◽  
Health Governance ◽  
Recent Contribution ◽  
Health Security ◽  
Health Politics ◽  
The Us ◽  
Complete Alignment ◽  
Explicit Consideration

Abstract The logic of “risk” is increasingly important in the study of global health politics. One recent contribution has even argued that risk is beginning to replace security as the defining logic of health governance and policy. Others dispute this on the basis that risk and security have always operated together in the “securitization” of disease. This article constitutes a theoretical intervention into this burgeoning debate. Does a stronger appreciation of risk warrant the diminishment of security? Are we looking at the “riskification” of health rather than “securitization”? Or would this miss the way these two logics might be complimentary or intertwined in ways that we are yet to theorize? I argue that the global health and securitization literatures are better served by an explicit consideration of risk and security logics in interplay, or never entirely encompassed by the other, nor in complete alignment, yet never truly separate. To do this, I propose a reconceptualization of the central problem—exceptionalism—that allows for risk to be understood as a form of exceptionalist politics. I demonstrate the validity of this approach through an otherwise “easy case” of securitization: the US response to the 2014–2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

The State and Global Health

2018 ◽  
pp. 279-299
Author(s):  
Ted Schrecker
Keyword(s):  
Global Health ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
The State ◽  
State Agencies ◽  
Health Politics ◽  
Poor Countries ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
International Interaction

Although global health researchers and practitioners routinely interact with state agencies, the research literature contains little theorizing or critical reflection on the role of the state. This chapter addresses this neglect on two dimensions: states’ policies within their borders and states’ involvement with global health politics and other areas of international interaction that influence health. Examples are drawn from both rich and poor countries. The chapter concludes by examining three lines of argument related to the declining relevance of the nation-state, organized around pressures for economic policy convergence; the proliferation of non-state actors in global health; and the emergence of a nascent transnational state. While each has merit, each likewise risks overstating the case for a ‘post-Westphalian’ global order.

scholarly journals The Global Politics of Health Security before, during, and after COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 467-481
Author(s):  
Andreas Papamichail
Keyword(s):  
Global Health ◽  
Disease Outbreaks ◽  
Global Health Security ◽  
Health Security ◽  
Health Politics ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
Security Regime ◽  
Border Politics ◽  
Firm Basis

AbstractThe COVID-19 pandemic has been shaped by preexisting political, social, and economic relations and governance structures, and will remold these structures going forward. This review essay considers three books on global health politics written by Simon Rushton, Clare Wenham, and Jeremy Youde. Here, I explore what these books collectively and individually can tell us about these preexisting dynamics, the events of the first eighteen months of the COVID-19 pandemic, and possible future directions in the politics of global health. I argue that they provide a firm basis for understanding the inequitable burdens of the pandemic, while juxtaposing these inequities against the narratives of shared vulnerability that sit at the heart of the global health security regime. They also help us make sense of the surveillance, detection, containment, and response mechanisms we have seen during the pandemic; the failures to address the systemic dynamics that drive disease outbreaks; and the national and international politics that have shaped the pandemic response. However, COVID-19 has also vividly and brutally demonstrated how global health hierarchies, racism, border politics, and neoliberal forms of knowledge production have led to a stratified burden of the pandemic. These areas are less apparent in the three books, but ought to be situated front and center in future critical scholarship on global health security.

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