Decolonising Global Solidarity: The WHO’s Broken Alarm and Epidemiological Nationalism

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has traumatised world leaders, leading people to question the capability and accountability of global health governance. Against this background, we have heard multiple calls to strengthen ‘solidarity’ within and between states – which, weirdly, is practised by keeping a distance from ‘Others’ through, for instance, social distancing, lockdowns, and border control. In this paper, I first introduce the post-World War II international pandemic response regime, especially the International Health Regulations 2005, using the multiple positions of the Republic of China and/or Taiwan to illustrate the prioritisation of national sovereignty over health justice. In and beyond this context, I conceptualise epidemiological nationalism, which contains three dimensions (territorial, affective, and epistemic) to critically examine the responses to COVID-19 from the WHO and different states. This concept enables us to analyse the solidarity-through-distancing practices from a decolonial perspective to deconstruct the contemporary global health regime. The regime is underpinned by the coloniality of modern epidemiology, which creates the hierarchies between nations and races imposed on the making and working of geographical, population, and disease categories by racialising diseases and response measures. Such racialisation practices vary in different contexts and are often tied to states’ securitisation practices, which justify the exclusion of minority communities.