Global governance: new challenges and threats

Global governance: old and new challenges

The current world economic crisis has highlighted a profound challenge to conventional thinking on and approaches to human rights, especially the right to development. Human rights, primarily economic and social rights, are based on a theory of constant expansion of the economic pie for all, and the right to development is explicitly predicated on the idea of the nation State leading the ever-i...

History, Structure and Agency in Global Health Governance; Comment on “Global Health Governance Challenges 2016 – Are We Ready?”

Ilona Kickbusch’s thought provoking editorial is criticized in this commentary, partly because she fails to refer to previous critical work on the global conditions and policies that sustain inequality, poverty, poor health and damage to the biosphere and, as a result, she misreads global power and elides consideration of the fundamental historical structures of political and material power tha...

Global Health Governance Challenges 2016 – Are We Ready?

The year 2016 could turn out to be a turning point for global health, new political realities and global insecurities will test governance and financing mechanisms in relation to both people and planet. But most importantly political factors such as the global power shift and “the rise of the rest” will define the future of global health. A new mix of health inequity and security challenges has...

New global viral threats

Infectious diseases have caused great catastrophes in human history, as in the example of the plague, which wiped out half of the population in Europe in the 14th century. Ebola virus and H7N9 avian influenza virus are 2 lethal pathogens that we have encountered in the second decade of the 21st century. Ebola infection is currently being seen in West Africa, and H7N9 avian flu appears to have s...

Managing the new global threats