“Why States Matter: Nation States, Transnational Law and the Governance of Global Health”

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Abstract:

Scholarship on global health law has generally underplayed the role of states in achieving, adapting and resisting governance measures. This analytical blindspot is significantly due to the universalistic nature of medical science, which is itself shadowed by a humanitarian ethic, blind to national distinctions, and realized ideally through international human rights law. In this empirico-ethical constellation the state can only be figured as a transmission belt or an obstacle. In practice, however, as Covid-19 showed, nation states are key sites for the realization of global health. Lockdowns, closed borders and vaccine procurement were all achieved through state agencies, defining national frontiers, and indeed serving to confirm the nation state as the horizon of expectation for health protection among citizens. This paper offers a model by which we can account for the role of the state in global health, which takes seriously the imperial origins of the current state system, in reflecting on the nature of the state and the manner in which it is transformed by transnational legal ordering, in health as in other sectors.

John HARRINGTON is Professor of Global Health Law, Director Welsh Graduate School for the Social Sciences at School of Law and Politics, Cardiff University, UK.