ABSTRACT
Examining the place of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) on the health security agenda is fundamentally a diagnosis of absence. Despite claims that the threats posed by infectious disease are distinct from traditional state-based enemies, the construction of disease as a security threat in the discourse does little to validate this argument. Rather, as this analysis demonstrates, it is the compatibility of infectious diseases with the traditional security paradigm that makes them a more conducive object of securitization than NCDs. In this chapter, we develop this argument by illustrating how such compatibility exists in three dimensions: the potential for infectious disease to be a catalyst for sociopolitical and economic transformation; the fact that it derives from organisms that may be targeted for eradication; and its immediacy as a public health threat. Such concerns mean that infectious disease fits comfortably within a traditional state-centric understanding of security. More puzzling is the fact that those who have taken a human security-based approach have exhibited a similar prioritization. By documenting the analytical and praxiological privilege that infection enjoys in the human security discourse, we demonstrate how this discourse has occluded NCDs. In so doing, we set the stage for a political critique to be articulated – specifically that there must be greater scholarly and policy urgency lent to the challenge of NCDs. While securitization is one means by which that urgency might be communicated, we do not claim this process is inevitable or even desirable; after all, the analytical tools that have framed the infectious disease threat in ways compatible with a traditional security paradigm are inappropriate for a categorically different form of illness.
