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In this editorial we ask key questions about what it means to publish ‘a journal’ in a world of publishing which is driven by individual article metrics and online access. Seeing the value of journals as venues for intellectual debate, we therefore set out a renewed vision as to how the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers can provide space for more collective and collaborative approaches to geographical debate. This approach revolves around the idea of ‘transactions’ itself and creating spaces in the journal for more commentary, debate and dialogue, alongside continuing to publish landmark papers.

Global access to coronavirus vaccines has been extraordinarily unequal and remains an ongoing source of global health insecurities from the evolution of viral variants in the bodies of the unvaccinated. There have nevertheless been at least 3 significant alternatives developed to this disastrous bioethical failure. These alternatives are reviewed in this article in the terms of "vaccine diplomacy," "vaccine charity," and "vaccine liberty." Vaccine diplomacy includes the diverse bilateral deliveries of vaccines organized by the geopolitical considerations of countries strategically seeking various kinds of global and regional advantages in international relations. Vaccine charity centrally involves the humanitarian work of the global health agencies and donor governments that have organized the COVAX program as an antidote to unequal access. Despite their many promises, however, both vaccine diplomacy and vaccine charity have failed to deliver the doses needed to overcome the global vaccination gap. Instead, they have unfortunately served to immunize the global vaccine supply system from more radical demands for a "people's vaccine," technological transfer, and compulsory licensing of vaccine intellectual property (IP). These more radical demands represent the third alternative to vaccine access inequalities. As a mix of nongovernmental organization-led and politician-led social justice demands, they are diverse and multifaceted, but together they have been articulated as calls for vaccine liberty. After first describing the realities of vaccine access inequalities, this article compares and contrasts the effectiveness thus far of the 3 alternatives. In doing so, it also provides a critical bioethical framework for reflecting on how the alternatives have come to compete with one another in the context of the vaccine property norms and market structures entrenched in global IP law. The uneven and limited successes of vaccine diplomacy and vaccine charity in delivering vaccines in underserved countries can be reconsidered in this way as compromised successes that not only compete with one another, but that have also worked together to undermine the promise of universal access through vaccine liberty.

The COVID-19 pandemic has at once exposed, exploited and exacerbated the health-damaging transformations in world order tied to neoliberal globalization. Our central argument is that the same neoliberal plans, policies and practices advanced globally in the name of promoting wealth have proved disastrous in terms of protecting health in the context of the pandemic. To explain why, we point to a combinatory cascade of socio-viral co-pathogenesis that we call neoliberal disease. From the vectors of vulnerability created by unequal and unstable market societies, to the reduced response capacities of market states and health systems, to the constrained ability of official global health security agencies and regulations to offer effective global health governance, we show how the virus has found weaknesses in a market-transformed global body politic that it has used to viral advantage. By thereby turning the inequalities and inadequacies of neoliberal societies and states into global health insecurities the pandemic also raises questions about whether we now face an inflection point when political dis-ease with neoliberal norms will lead to new kinds of post-neoliberal policy-making. We conclude, nevertheless, that the prospects for such political-economic transformation on a global scale remain quite limited despite all the extraordinary damage of neoliberal disease described in the article.

This paper explores the challenges faced by unhoused women in accessing general and reproductive health care services in Santa Cruz, CA. Semi-structured interviews with women experiencing houselessness were conducted in Santa Cruz, CA with a focus on their narrative experiences as patients. The overwhelming majority of participants expressed appreciation for clinics that provided support through longer hours, alternative therapies, and appointment reminders. Overall, the interviews indicated that women who had access to a social worker were much more likely to report improved access to satisfactory treatment. These findings suggest that there is not a tangible lack of healthcare services for unhoused women in the local community, but rather a burden of treatment navigation caused by a dearth of information on how to access care. The interviews suggest that this burden can be reduced with social work interventions and service centers that offer health navigation support. By adapting theories of the "burden of treatment," we argue that additional attention must be paid to overcoming the "burden of treatment navigation." For related reasons, we suggest that increasing the availability of social workers would concretely improve health outcomes for unhoused women.

This article examines how contending constructions of safe space for migrants reflect the geopoliticization of humanitarianism and its geosocial discontents. It contrasts geopolitical constructions of safe space that have been used by European authorities to justify and administer Hotspots with geosocial efforts to construct safe space through practices of solidaristic accommodation. The article documents the ways in which Hotspots have made migrants unsafe, even as they have been simultaneously justified in humanitarian terms as making both Europe and refugees safer. It further illustrates, by contrast, how counter-constructions of safe space can take divergent geosocial forms. These varied geosocial formations of accommodation emerge out of embodied space-making struggles for physical safety, personal dignity, organizational autonomy, radical democracy, spatial liberty, and social community. They create context-contingent alternatives to Hotspot geopolitics as well as opportunities for migrants and their allies to critique the limits of official humanitarianism. But they also remain overdetermined by the dominant border politics that Hotpots are supposed to secure. For these reasons, the borderlands between the abstract geopolitics of Hotspot humanitarianism and the embodied geosocial constructions of solidarity show safe space to be at once complex, compromised, and constantly contested.

Introducing a special commentary section focused on geoeconomics, this paper reviews why such commentary is especially timely given current world events and the break‐down in neoliberal globalisation. It thereby points to the geo‐historical importance of the call for critical geoeconomics made by Mallin and Sidaway (2023a), and also introduces the backgrounds of the five commentators on their article's key contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advances in conjunctural analysis and insights into global production networks (GPNs) are used to examine the ways policymakers develop bio-pharma development strategies to manage the trade-offs between economic value capture and securing value for health. Four strategic state roles are identified – provision, protection, procurement and production – all shown to be recombined in conjuncture-contingent ways. Case studies of California's Bay Area, Puerto Rico's Bio-Island, China's Greater Bay Area, Singapore's Biopolis and South Africa's mRNA Hub in Cape Town illustrate how each regional conjuncture leads to recombinations of the roles in ways that reflect the connected but also competing and contested strategies for securing economic value vis-à-vis health value. The resulting variegation of development makes manifest policy struggles that continue to complicate the meanings of strategic coupling and value in hubs of bio-pharma GPNs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]