The Promise of Pro-health Politics
The world may be mired in the Covid-19 calamity, but we are seeing little of much-needed international co-operation. Instead, we witness a blame game and power politics between the US and China, selfcentered nationalism and isolationism. Since the 1990s, security discourse has emerged in the realm of global public health to prevail and eventually take root in the current global health governance that includes the World Health Organization and the International Health Regulations, most recently revised in 2005. Simon Rushton, senior lecturer of the University of Sheffield, probes the issues and problems recurring from the securitizing of disease and health, with great relevance to the Covid-19 crisis: short-term national interests; anti-democratic responses of states to disease that encroach upon civic and human rights; and global and local health inequalities.
For these persistent problems, he proposes “prohealth politics,” which should turn on human dignity and solidarity. At its center lies human security, as opposed to the prevailing national-security approach. In contrast with the narrow focus on infectious diseases, human security-based approaches deliberately view health in the widest sense, tackling the underlying political, social and economic determinants of poor health, not least national and global inequalities. A pro-health politics as Rushton suggests wouldn’t be an immediate cure for the Covid-19 crisis, but would provide just prescriptions for the coming years that the entire world should ponder.
Global Asia.