China’s Rise and Balance of Power Politics

Intellectuals and the Rise of Mass Politics

Politics, Power, Poverty and Global Health: Systems and Frames

Striking disparities in access to healthcare and in health outcomes are major characteristics of health across the globe. This inequitable state of global health and how it could be improved has become a highly popularized field of academic study. In a series of articles in this journal the roles of power and politics in global health have been addressed in considerable detail. Three points are...

Framing Political Change: Can a Left Populism Disrupt the Rise of the Reactionary Right?; Comment on “Politics, Power, Poverty and Global Health: Systems and Frames”

Solomon Benatar offers an important critique of the limited frame that sets the boundaries of much of what is referred to as ‘global health.’ In placing his comments within a criticism of increasing poverty (or certainly income and wealth inequalities) and the decline in our environmental commons, he locates our health inequities within the pathology of our present global economy. In that respe...

Power and Organizational Politics

Definitions of power abound. German sociologist, Max Weber defined power as "the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance." Along similar lines, Emerson suggests that "The power of actor A over actor B is the amount of resistance on the part of B which can be potentially overcome by A." Power appears to involve on...

The Politics of Researching Global Health Politics; Comment on “Knowledge, Moral Claims and the Exercise of Power in Global Health”

In this comment, I build on Shiffman’s call for the global health community to more deeply investigate structural and productive power. I highlight two challenges we must grapple with as social scientists carrying out the types of investigation that Shiffman proposes: the politics of  challenging the powerful; and the need to investigate types of expertise that have traditionally been thought o...