Refounding Legitimacy Toward a Global Immune System

Global Health as a Field of Power Relations: A Response to Recent Commentaries

Actors working in global health often portray it as an enterprise grounded in principled concerns, advanced by individuals and organizations who draw on scientific evidence to pursue health equity. This portrait is incomplete. It is also a field of power relations—a social arena in which actors claim and draw on expertise and moral authority to gain influence and pursue career, organizational a...

Refounding legitimacy towards Aethogenesis

The fusion of humans and technology takes us into an unknown world, described by some authors as populated by quasi-living species that would relegate us—ordinary humans—to the rank of alienated agents, emptied of our identity and consciousness. I argue instead that our world is woven of simple, though invisible, perspectives, which—if we become aware of them—may renew our ability for making ju...

COVID-19: The potential role of nutritional deficiencies, global climatic changes, and immune system dysfunction

Your Call Could not be Completed as Dialled: Why Truth Does not Speak to Power In Global Health; Comment on “Knowledge, Moral Claims and the Exercise of Power in Global Health”

This article contends that legitimacy in the exercise of power comes from the consent of those subject to it. In global health, this implies that the participation of poor country citizens is required for the legitimacy of major actors and institutions. But a review of institutions and processes suggests that this participation is limited or absent. Particularly because of the complex political...

State Support: A Prerequisite for Global Health Network Effectiveness; Comment on “Four Challenges that Global Health Networks Face”

Shiffman recently summarized lessons for network effectiveness from an impressive collection of case-studies. However, in common with most global health governance analysis in recent years, Shiffman underplays the important role of states in these global networks. As the body which decides and signs international agreements, often provides the resourcing, and is responsible for implementing ini...