Negotiating Intersecting Precarities: COVID-19, Pandemic Preparedness and Response in Africa

Abstract

This article shares findings on COVID-19 in Africa across 2020 to examine concepts and practices of epidemic preparedness and response. Amidst uncertainties about the trajectory of COVID-19, the stages of emergency response emerge in practice as interconnected. We illustrate how complex dynamics manifest as diverse actors interpret and modify approaches according to contexts and experiences. We suggest that the concept of “intersecting precarities” best captures the temporalities at stake; that these precarities include the effects of epidemic control measures; and that people do not just accept but actively negotiate these intersections as they seek to sustain their lives and livelihoods.

Epidemics and the Military: Responding to COVID-19 in Uganda

“…Echoing the WHO constitution, the literature explicitly evoked links between health and security, but, in the context of upheavals during the 1990s and the discussions about R2P, the policy implications of the word ‘security’ shifted. Previously, ‘health and security’ had mainly focused on the health of armed forces and how health and health care were influenced by conflict ( McInnes 2015 ); or foregrounded epidemics that occurred centuries ago (e.g., Wenham, 2019 ), or, especially in the context of HIV/AIDS, the balancing of risks and insurance ( Elbe, 2008 ). Now, health security was being connected more overtly with militarised security, direct threats to peace, and even to the possibility of pathogens being weaponised (e.g., Heymann, 2003 ; Farmer, 2014 ).…”

​Disease X and Africa: How a Scientific Metaphor Entered Popular Imaginaries of the Online Public During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…The construction of an imaginary of a continent as being deficient and underprepared also feeds into an imaginary of other places (usually those in the Global North) as being powerful and having agency. Although the African continent had far fewer deaths per capita in 2020 due to COVID-19 than other places in the world, this resilience does not seem to have become as visible in the global imaginary as its continued perceived lack of 'preparedness' (MacGregor et al 2022;Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center 2021).…”

Humanitarian inversions:COVID‐19 as crisis

“…In the present, human suffering has been framed in quite different ways. For example, as COVID‐19 circulated with force in North America, Europe, and Latin America in 2020, African countries were hailed as a ‘paradox’ (Ghosh et al, 2020; MacGregor et al, 2022). Initial epidemiological predictions that COVID‐19 would cause large‐scale mortality and devastation throughout the continent were met with disbelief when this did not initially happen (Harper‐Shipman & Bako, 2021).…”

“…Understanding these ruptures in terms of an ‘inversion’ illuminates the dynamic conceptual reversals and transpositions in how humanitarianism is imagined, rather than simply a radical break with the organising assumptions that preceded them. An inversion also points to the flimsy and contingent nature of its organising spatial logics, where to understand something as ‘humanitarian’ depends on ‘circumstance and varies from one context to another’ (Brada, 2016, p. 755; see also MacGregor et al, 2022). This is an idea that has been explored in relation to global health, which is a category of action, intervention, and analysis predicated on profound inequities between Global North and South (see Crane, 2011; Herrick, 2016).…”