Suchergebnisse

Encapsulating security : pharmaceutical defenses against biological danger -- Discovering a virus's achilles heel : flu fighting at molecular scale -- The pill always wins: Gilead Sciences, Roche and the birth of Tamiflu -- What a difference a day makes : the margin call for regulatory agencies -- Virtual blockbuster : bird flu and the pandemic of preparedness planning -- In the eye of the storm : global access, generics and intellectual property -- 'Ode to Tamiflu' : side effects, teenage 'suicides' and corporate liabilities -- Data backlash : Roche and Cochrane square up over clinical trial data -- 'To boldly go...' : pharmaceutical enterprises and global health security -- Epilogue : pharmaceuticals, security and molecular life

Provides an overview of the evolution of political Islam in South-east Asia. Analyses the sources of relgious radicalism and assesses the regional terrorist and radical networks. Describes how secular democratic institutions can be strengthened, and how moderate and tolerant tendencies can be promoted.

Bound up with the human cost of HIV/AIDS is the critical issue of its impact on national and international security, yet attempts to assess the pandemic's complex risk fail to recognize the political dangers of construing the disease as a security threat. The securitization of HIV/AIDS not only affects the discussion of the disease in international policy debates, but also transforms the very nature and function of security within global politics. In his analysis of the security implications of HIV/AIDS, Stefan Elbe addresses three concerns: the empirical evidence that justifies

There has been a deliberative, but as yet unsuccessful, attempt by scholars and policy makers to articulate a more meaningful idea of Europe, which would enhance the legitimacy of the European Union and provide the basis for a European identity. Using a detailed analysis of the writings of Nietzsche, Elbe seeks to address this problem and argues that Nietzsche's thinking about Europe can significantly illuminate our understanding. He demonstrates how Nietzsche's critique of nationalism and the notion of the 'good European' can assist contemporary scholars in the quest for a vision of Europe an.

Countries all around the world are increasingly coordinating their strategic responses to global health emergencies inside specialized new command centres called emergency operations centres (EOCs). Those bunker-like EOCs are meticulously designed to function as the global health equivalent of war rooms and are rapidly emerging as the internationally preferred sites for 'making' global health security in the 21st century. This article advances an in-depth site-ontological investigation into those burgeoning EOC sites. It develops a three-step methodological analytics to reveal the specific economy of prefigurative power that EOCs exude in international relations and names this oligoptical power. The article further shows how this oligoptical power is fundamentally different from the more familiar Foucauldian notion of panoptical power and has very different ramifications as it circulates throughout contemporary international relations. Yet, precisely because the EOC exemplifies this global operation of oligoptical power, the article concludes, it can be considered as one of its international signal institutions – similarly to how the prison was once a critical institutional site for revealing the circulation of disciplinary power, the laboratory for performing the sociological examination of science, and the concentration camp for deepening the analysis of biopower.

This article investigates the global inequities imbricated in the international response to lethal viruses. It does so by developing a virographic approach to the study of international relations that builds upon the matrix methods pioneered within black feminist thought for unraveling particularly complex forms of interlocking oppression. Performing such a virography of international relations exposes the multifaceted economic, racial, and epistemological disparities embedded in the international management of emergent viruses. It further demonstrates how those multiple axes of international inequality intersect during viral outbreaks to form a deadly matrix of global subjugation—vital abandonment—that repeatedly deprives the world's majority population from equitable access to life-saving biomedical interventions. It finally also reveals how diplomatic assertions of viral sovereignty, that is, claiming legal ownership of pathogens, are directly enrolling lethal viruses now in the political strategies of countries seeking to resist their vital abandonment. Overall, a virography thus contributes to the broader study of international relations by foregrounding the global salience of epidemiological injustices and positionalities, by capturing the actant power of lethal viruses in contemporary world politics, and by intimating that the "international" can itself be studied as a continually reconfiguring matrix of interlocking and historically conditioned global inequities.

This article investigates the global inequities imbricated in the international response to lethal viruses. It does so by developing a virographic approach to the study of international relations that builds upon the matrix methods pioneered within black feminist thought for unraveling particularly complex forms of interlocking oppression. Performing such a virography of international relations exposes the multifaceted economic, racial, and epistemological disparities embedded in the international management of emergent viruses. It further demonstrates how those multiple axes of international inequality intersect during viral outbreaks to form a deadly matrix of global subjugation—vital abandonment—that repeatedly deprives the world's majority population from equitable access to life-saving biomedical interventions. It finally also reveals how diplomatic assertions of viral sovereignty, that is, claiming legal ownership of pathogens, are directly enrolling lethal viruses now in the political strategies of countries seeking to resist their vital abandonment. Overall, a virography thus contributes to the broader study of international relations by foregrounding the global salience of epidemiological injustices and positionalities, by capturing the actant power of lethal viruses in contemporary world politics, and by intimating that the "international" can itself be studied as a continually reconfiguring matrix of interlocking and historically conditioned global inequities.

Global health emergencies – like COVID-19 – pose major and recurring threats in the 21st century. Now societies can be better protected against such harrowing outbreaks by analysing the detailed genetic sequence data of new pathogens. Why, then, is this valuable epistemic resource frequently withheld by stakeholders – hamstringing the international response and potentially putting lives at risk? This article initiates the social scientific study of bioinformational diplomacy, that is, the emerging field of tensions, sensitivities, practices and enabling instruments surrounding the timely international exchange of bioinformation about global health emergencies. The article genealogically locates this nascent field at the intersection of molecularised life, informationalised biology and securitised health. It investigates the deeper political, economic and scientific problematisations that are engendering this burgeoning field. It finally analyses the emergent international instruments developed by governments, scientists and industry to facilitate more rapid global sharing of bioinformation through novel practices of data passporting. Overall, the in-depth study of bioinformational diplomacy reveals just how deeply, and even constitutively, international relations are entangled with the life sciences – by carefully tracing how laboratory practices of sequencing life at molecular scale also end up recontouring the play of sovereignty, power and security in international relations.

Global health emergencies – like COVID-19 – pose major and recurring threats in the 21st century. Now societies can be better protected against such harrowing outbreaks by analysing the detailed genetic sequence data of new pathogens. Why, then, is this valuable epistemic resource frequently withheld by stakeholders – hamstringing the international response and potentially putting lives at risk? This article initiates the social scientific study of bioinformational diplomacy, that is, the emerging field of tensions, sensitivities, practices and enabling instruments surrounding the timely international exchange of bioinformation about global health emergencies. The article genealogically locates this nascent field at the intersection of molecularised life, informationalised biology and securitised health. It investigates the deeper political, economic and scientific problematisations that are engendering this burgeoning field. It finally analyses the emergent international instruments developed by governments, scientists and industry to facilitate more rapid global sharing of bioinformation through novel practices of data passporting. Overall, the in-depth study of bioinformational diplomacy reveals just how deeply, and even constitutively, international relations are entangled with the life sciences – by carefully tracing how laboratory practices of sequencing life at molecular scale also end up recontouring the play of sovereignty, power and security in international relations.

AbstractPharmaceuticals are now critical to the security of populations. Antivirals, antibiotics, next-generation vaccines, and antitoxins are just some of the new 'medical countermeasures' that governments are stockpiling in order to defend their populations against the threat of pandemics and bioterrorism. How has security policy come to be so deeply imbricated with pharmaceutical logics and solutions? This article captures, maps, and analyses the 'pharmaceuticalisation' of security. Through an in-depth analysis of the prominent antiviral medicationTamiflu, it shows that this pharmaceutical turn in security policy is intimately bound up with the rise of a molecular vision of life promulgated by the biomedical sciences. Caught in the crosshairs of powerful commercial, political, and regulatory pressures, governments are embracing a molecular biomedicine promising to secure populations pharmaceutically in the twenty-first century. If that is true, then the established disciplinary view of health as a predominantly secondary matter of 'low' international politics is mistaken. On the contrary, the social forces of health and biomedicine are powerful enough to influence the core practices of international politics – even those of security. For a discipline long accustomed to studying macrolevel processes and systemic structures, it is in the end also our knowledge of the minute morass of molecules that shapes international relations.

How is the rise of global health security transforming contemporary practices of security? To date the literature on global health security has sought to trace how the securitisation of global health is affecting the governance of diseases in the international system; yet no-one has analysed – conversely – how the practices of security also begin subtly to change when they become concerned with a growing number of contemporary health issues. This article identifies three such changes. First, health security debates endow our understandings of security and insecurity in contemporary world politics with an important medical dimension. Second, the rise of global health security enables a range of medical and public health experts to play a greater role in the formulation and analysis of contemporary security policy. Finally, health security debates have also encouraged attempts to secure populations through recourse to a growing array of pharmacological interventions and new medical countermeasures. Drawing upon a rich literature in medical sociology, these three transformations in the contemporary practice of security collectively constitute the 'medicalisation of security'. This novel perspective on the rise of global health security also reveals new limitations inherent in the emerging health–security interface – limitations associated not so much with the processes of 'securitisation' already noted in the global health literature, but rather with wider social processes of 'medicalisation'. Awareness of the additional limitations renders the threat of a future pandemic even more serious than is commonly thought.