Securitising Covid-19? The Politics of Global Health and the Limits of the Copenhagen School

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked controversies over health security strategies adopted in different countries. The urge to curb the spread of the virus has supported policies to restrict mobility and to build up state surveillance, which might induce authoritarian forms of government. In this context, the Copenhagen School has offered an analytical repertoire that informs many analyses in the fields of critical security studies and global health. Accordingly, the securitisation of COVID-19 might be necessary to deal with the crisis, but it risks unfolding discriminatory practices and undemocratic regimes, with potentially enduring effects. In this article, we look into controversies over pandemic-control strategies to discuss the political and analytical limitations of securitisation theory. On the one hand, we demonstrate that the focus on moments of rupture and exception conceals security practices that unfold in ongoing institutional disputes and over the construction of legitimate knowledge about public health. On the other hand, we point out that securitisation theory hinders a genealogy of modern apparatuses of control and neglects violent forms of government which are manifested not in major disruptive acts, but in the everyday dynamics of unequal societies. We conclude by suggesting that an analysis of the bureaucratic disputes and scientific controversies that constitute health security knowledges and practices enables critical approaches to engage with the multiple – and, at times, mundane – processes in which (in)security is produced, circulated, and contested.

The International Health Security and National Parliamentary Election: The COVID-19 Elections in Southeast Europe and their Outcomes

“…Although its causative agent -the SARS-CoV-2 virus had been isolated and identified as like the SARSCoV-1 virus responsible for the SARS epidemic in East Asia in [2002][2003][2004], modern medicine initially had no response to the disease, apart from epidemiological measures to prevent the spread of infection in the context of its securitization and the concept of health security [3]. It should be emphasized that "part of this can be linked to a confluence of global health crises during this period: HIV/AIDS in the 1980s onward, the threat of bioterrorism highlighted by the Anthrax attacks of 2001, SARS in 2005, H1N1 in 2009, Ebola in 2014, Zika in 2016, and today, COVID-19" [4].…”

Government’s Policy in the Height of Covid-19 Pandemic

“…Scientists analyze symptoms, ways of transmission, prevention, treatment of disease, vaccines and variants of virus; supply and demand shocks, influence of pandemic on different sectors, unemployment and international trade, national economic recovery programs; social, financial, political and psychological consequences of the pandemic; vaccine apartheid. On a par philosophical aspect came under scrutiny in search for an answer to question: what is better -to favor utmost individualism, reflected in movements against social distancing rules and the mandatory face masks, or to manage the pandemic as a military campaign against national security threat [1]. All these and other aspects have been already discussed on different levels -personal, local, state and global.…”