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AbstractGlobal philanthropy is a significant source of financial resources in contemporary international relations, and it has provoked intense debates about the appropriateness of involving private foundations in global policymaking. Despite these facts, International Relations as a discipline has shown remarkably little reference to philanthropy as an important and relevant actor in global politics. In this article, I make the case for explicitly incorporating philanthropy into international relations analyses. Drawing on both historical examples and contemporary cases from the global health space, I show how philanthropy exerts a unique and independent influence within international society and that it needs to be understood holistically rather than focusing solely on individual philanthropic organisations. I also discuss how this expanding influence raises serious questions about accountability and legitimacy. Rather than making an argument about the appropriateness of philanthropy's involvement in international society, this article aims to make the case for philanthropy's analytical inclusion within the discipline.

The 1918–1919 influenza pandemic killed an estimated 20–100 million people, making it more lethal than the First World War and causing life expectancy rates to decline by approximately ten years. Nearly one hundred years later, though, there will be few (if any) commemorations of the pandemic and its effects on societies around the world, and the bodies affected are largely rendered invisible. Rather than trying to figure out how or why we remember, the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic requires us to consider why we don't remember. In this article, I suggest some possible reasons for this lack of remembrance and what it may say about the politics of memory. In particular, I consider the effects of transnationalism, the role of illness as a presence or absence within international politics, the absenting of bodies and how it contributes to commemorative silences, and the ambiguity around what gets performed when we remember or commemorate.

The contemporary global health governance system has evolved over 150 years to facilitate cooperation among states in dealing with cross-border health concerns. This article uses the current outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) to examine global health governance's history, evolution, and status within the political science literature. In particular, the article focuses on the International Health Regulations and the World Health Organization as leading elements of the global health governance system in order to examine both how the system operates and what its shortcomings are.