Reconceptualising health security in post-COVID-19 world

Abstract

While drawing upon the existing literature and policy documents on health security and its practice at the national and global levels, this article shows that the idea of health security has mostly remained rhetoric or at the most conceptualised and operationalised within the narrow Westphalian tradition of protecting nation states from external threats. By undertaking a critical examination of the national security strategies of some powerful G-20 countries, we show that non-traditional threats such as infectious diseases and pandemics are either absent from the list of potential threats or are accorded a weak priority and addressed within the state and military-centric notion of security. This approach has shortcomings that are laid bare by the ongoing pandemic. In this article, we show how national and global health security agendas can be advanced much more productively by mobilising a wider securitisation discourse that is driven by the human security paradigm as advanced by the United Nations in 1994, that considers people rather than states as the primary referent of security and that emphasises collective action rather than competition to address the transnational nature of security threats. We discuss the relevance of this paradigm in broadening the concept of health security in view of the contemporary and future threats to public health.