Health as a Strategic Leverage: Navigating Chokepoints with Diplomacy [GUEST ESSAY]

Readers,

A no-blinkers view on the shifts shaping global health is necessary, when so much is changing in geopolitics.

In today's edition, we bring you a clear-eyed analysis from leading global health scholar, Ilona Kickbusch, who discusses opportunities for health diplomacy within the rubric of the on-going negotiations on the Pathogen Access Benefit Sharing (PABS) System at the World Health Organization. She argues that health has long been used as a leverage in international relations. And raises an urgent question on whether health actors will develop the strategic literacy to respond intelligently.

In this essay, Kickbusch draws upon the past as a guide, and refers to the challenges in the future, to map leverages in the present. Read on!

Global Health is far too siloed. Factoring in the interdisciplinary view in global health negotiations may be useful in the context of the cold calculus of prevailing geopolitics. We hope you find this contribution instructive and timely.

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More from us in the coming days. In case you missed these from us during the Easter break: a first quarter wrap from us, and the announcement of the fellows joining us this year.

Best,

Priti

Priti Patnaik, Founder & Publisher, Geneva Health Files

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GUEST ESSAY

Health as a Strategic Leverage: Navigating Chokepoints with Diplomacy

By Ilona Kickbusch

Changes in health diplomacy

For decades, global health has positioned itself as above geopolitics — a humanitarian domain governed by solidarity, science, and the shared imperative to protect human life. That self-image was always partially fiction, health has long been a bargaining chip in international relations. What has changed is the sophistication with which political actors play that game, and the reluctance of global health institutions to acknowledge it.