How the health-security nexus disguises a global health challenge:
While health and security have long been comfortable bedfellows, health issues have, especially since the Cold War, become more consistently framed as security concerns. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how quick governments of high-income countries were to tap into the security lexicon and characterise the pandemic as a security threat.
This session will first demonstrate how security is a malleable and evolutive concept, that has increasingly allowed health to take up a prominent place on the security agenda. As part of this evolution, ‘health security’ has gained traction on the international level as a solution to health threats of global scale. As an extension of the concept of security, this presentation will address the theory and practice of health security, to illuminate a different perspective of health security.
By understanding security, and particularly ‘health security’, this session will allow students to critically reflect on how and why COVID-19 was so extensively considered a security threat by international actors, as well as the effects of adopting a health security perspective on global health.
VersaHealth 