The Importance Of Global Health

When discussing why International Relations ignored global health in the past and why global health has now become part of the International Relations agenda, the authors choose to adopt a reflectivist, or constructivist position, seeing this development as a construction which serves some interests over others, and a change in the way in which we understand the world and how we perceive our interests. From this constructivist position, the authors explain that health was ignored in the domain of International Relations because there were not perceived interests in engaging in public health. Specifically, health appeared to International Relations scholars as a domestic concern largely unrelated to matters of national security. The authors …show more content…
A new dominant narrative in International Relations, based on perceptions of change in the material world, has allowed this emergence of health into International Relations to occur. This narrative has focused on the emergence of infectious disease outbreaks, the global nature of health, and the increased emphasis on health as part of the political arena. The authors go on to explain each of these three parts of the dominant narrative in more detail, in an effort to show how health has become a part of the International Relations agenda. First is the focus on infectious disease and the new outbreak narrative. Infectious diseases account for around one-third of total mortality each year, thus, these diseases have received significant attention in public health policy. Second, there is this new notion that health is no longer a predominantly national-level concern but has significant global dimensions; thus, there is a need for better global health governance, which causes the domain International Relations to play a role in global public health. Third, there is the politicization of global health. Since 2000, two important emerging frameworks have placed politics within the arena of global health. The first is a Keynesian approach to health policy, which posits that the disease burden on the poor has a direct effect on the wealth of individual societies. Thus, government investment in the health needs of developing countries is needed as a central component of their economic growth and development. Further, because health has become global, investment in these health needs is necessary to prevent spillover effects that threaten global well-being. The second framework is a focus on securitization through the link between health, and foreign and security policy. While, previously, International Relations believed that health policy is a domestic problem that should