Body Politics, Domination and Vulnerability: A Critique of Global Health Security

Abstract

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This chapter develops a critical perspective on global health security. It takes the standpoint of critical security studies and specifically an emancipatory perspective, that is, one concerned with ensuring the conditions for the realization of human potentialities. It asks how we can deploy critique to make a judgment on claims to health insecurity and on interventions designed to address health security problems. The argument is organized as follows. First, the chapter argues that the critique of global health security should start from the recognition of the politics underpinning the bodily and experiential dimensions of insecurity. Second, it suggests that a critical approach should be based on the analysis of power relations marked by domination. Domination means that certain groups are made systematically vulnerable, in the sense of being inordinately exposed to harm and rendered unable to bounce back from harm when it occurs. On the basis of this, the argument suggests ways in which an emancipatory critique of health security can be developed. The chapter speaks to discussions about global health and health security in the discipline of International Relations.