Search

Countries all around the world are increasingly coordinating their strategic responses to global health emergencies inside specialized new command centres called emergency operations centres (EOCs). Those bunker-like EOCs are meticulously designed to function as the global health equivalent of war rooms and are rapidly emerging as the internationally preferred sites for 'making' global health security in the 21st century. This article advances an in-depth site-ontological investigation into those burgeoning EOC sites. It develops a three-step methodological analytics to reveal the specific economy of prefigurative power that EOCs exude in international relations and names this oligoptical power. The article further shows how this oligoptical power is fundamentally different from the more familiar Foucauldian notion of panoptical power and has very different ramifications as it circulates throughout contemporary international relations. Yet, precisely because the EOC exemplifies this global operation of oligoptical power, the article concludes, it can be considered as one of its international signal institutions – similarly to how the prison was once a critical institutional site for revealing the circulation of disciplinary power, the laboratory for performing the sociological examination of science, and the concentration camp for deepening the analysis of biopower. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brazil has suffered severe consequences from the Covid-19 pandemic, currently ranking second globally in terms of total fatalities, with more than 682,000 lives lost. This article critically outlines how a 'health security' framework overlooks processes of intersectionality and the varying impacts of the virus on different segments of society, or what we term health insecurity. We organize our analysis around three aspects of the pandemic that have become salient in Brazilian society, namely access to healthcare, disposable workers, and exposure to the virus, and delineate the intersectional impact of gendered inequality, neoliberal ideologies, and racial hierarchies within these three themes. Our methodology employs media and scholarly interpretations of Covid-19, and other secondary empirical and statistical data, to outline the virus's impacts on differently positioned bodies throughout Brazilian society. Our main findings reveal that during the pandemic, women's labor and health concerns have been undervalued, exploitative working conditions have been exacerbated, and Afro-Brazilians have been put in situations of higher exposure to the virus in both public and private spaces. This article underscores the need to better examine how public health, systems of oppression and exclusion, and (in)security overlap with each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Approaching health security from a practice-theoretical perspective, this article advances our understanding of the everyday and locality in health security decisionmaking, and is guided by the following two questions: How is it determined when a health security threat is likely to be present at a point of entry? What knowledge informs everyday health security decisions at borders? Markedly little is known about health security decisionmaking, though conventional wisdom tells us that health security decisions are based on stringent processes and – importantly – anchored in epidemiological knowledge. The assumed primacy of epidemiological knowledge in health security decisionmaking is well illustrated by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic: evidence-based responses emerged globally following sophisticated epidemiologic investigation. Are health security decisions always rooted in epidemiology? A 12-month period of non-participant observation of Port Health Officers – who, under the auspices of the 2005 International Health Regulations, are responsible for numerous prophylactic measures at the UK border – gives a unique, privileged entry point for understanding the health security decisionmaking process and tells a story that both questions the centrality of epidemiology and foregrounds the role of tacit knowledge and intuition in health security decisionmaking. This article, which draws on insights from the science and technology studies literature on tacit knowledge, shows how observed health risk taxonomies and corollary decisions in prophylactic border security are predicated almost exclusively on hunches and 'just knowing' that something 'doesn't feel right'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The securitization of health concerns within the European Union has hitherto received scant attention compared to other sectors. Drawing on the conceptual toolbox of actor-network theory, this article examines how a 'health security assemblage' rooted in EU governance has emerged, expanded, and stabilized. At the heart of this assemblage lies a particular knowledge regime, known as epidemic intelligence (EI): a vigilance-oriented approach of early detection and containment drawing on web-scanning tools and other informal sources. Despite its differences compared to entrenched traditions in public health, EI has, in only a decade's time, gained central importance at the EU level. EI is simultaneously constituted by, and performative of, a particular understanding of health security problems. By 'following the actor', this article seeks to account for how EI has made the hunt for potential health threats so central that detection and containment, rather than prevention, have become the preferred policy options. This article draws out some of the implications of this shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]