Globalisation and the Politics of Global Health

This chapter examines how the politics of global health have been shaped by globalisation. This means evaluating its effects on both the material level of political-economic integration and on the ideational level of political-cultural discourse. The former is conventionally tied through a focus on trade and travel to global public health security, and the latter is often associated with global humanitarian care. Going beyond this dualistic divide, however, this chapter argues that globalisation has spun a connective thread running through both regimes. This connective thread is the pro-market neo-liberal governance that sutures globalisation’s integrative and ideational dynamics with powerful binding implications for health. Due to these ties that bind, processes of neo-liberalisation deeply influence global health, creating global health vulnerabilities and problems through structural violence while also shaping and steering the delivery of global health responses. Global health governance remains influenced by other international and postcolonial health regimes that continue to inspire alternatives to the global expansion of neo-liberal norms. However, the same market forces that have made globalisation a synonym for processes of neo-liberalisation have also now become the dominant transnational influence shaping the ‘global’ in global health politics.