ABSTRACT
Global health security was formed by linking together two previously separate policy fields: health and national/international security. The linkage has resulted in diverse institutional forms of global health security with differing practices, meanings, and effects. In this chapter I provide a pocket genealogy of global health security organized through the World Health Organization (WHO) in the period from 1994 to 2005, one of the many global securities that were first invented in the 1990s. The approach is genealogical in the sense that it provides an historical account of the power/knowledge relations of expertise, combined here with a concern for broader geopolitical relations. It differs from those accounts that implicitly assume “global health security” began only when the phrase entered routine WHO usage from 2001, with scattered preconditions in the 1990s. I show that “global health security” names a governance apparatus, a sociotechnical one, in formation from 1994 by WHO, a process instigated by the United States and its Northern allies. An apparatus rather than a phrase, global health security conjoins human actors, objects, statements, and technical devices in networks formed through authorized expertise. I show that while the phrase “global health security” was used by WHO from 2000 onwards, it referred to a global outbreak detection and rapid response apparatus that had begun to take organizational form from 1995. “Global health security” and “global alert and response” remain synonymous in WHO usage to date.
