This chapter is concerned with extra-biological, extra-medical or extra-health factors, namely actions and inactions (commissions and omissions) that are morally unjust-that is, which are moral injustice-which ultimately cause, enable or contribute to pandemics and epidemics in Africa. Therefore, although this chapter is dealing with health, the framework of the chapter is neither biological nor medical, but political. This is what is referred to in the chapter as a political conception of pandemics and epidemics. The contention of the chapter is that the interactional and institutional failure to conform to the communal basic structure of society (assuming the communal basic structure is itself just and not unjust) causes, enables or contributes to pandemics and epidemics in Africa.

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The world is littered with wars in which innocent individual human beings, helpless groups of persons, and harmless institutions are casualties because they are directly or indirectly targeted and attacked. The nature or composition of such casualties calls for a revision of, or at least leads one to question, the dominant approach to the principle of noncombatant immunity. In just war theory, moral and political philosophers mostly approach the theorisation about the principle of the immunity of noncombatants from what may be termed the interactional approach. In this approach, combatants and noncombatants are conventionally conceived as individual human beings only or groups of persons. Consequently, the approach cannot show us how institutions cause or participate in war, and it cannot tell us why and how institutions should be treated in war, whether they should be treated as combatants or noncombatants, and when they should be treated as combatants or noncombatants. For this reason, the interactional approach is insufficient. However, in what may be referred to as the institutional approach, combatants and noncombatants can also be conceived as institutions rather than individuals or groups of persons, then arguments for and against the immunity of noncombatants can be proffered based on this institutional conception. Therefore, this paper contends that we need to supplement the interactional approach with the institutional approach in order to be able to: (i) ascertain the causal, constitutive, contributory and participatory roles of certain institutions in a particular war; and (ii) determine whether they are legitimate targets of attack.

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