Global Health in Crisis?

This book examines global health as a foreign policy issue in Germany, exploring its entanglement with security and economic concerns. Based on an ethnography at the German Federal Foreign Office (FFO) during Covid-19, it explores the emergence of this policy field, its variations in the pandemic moment, and the coordination of vaccine donations as a case study.

With global health as a growing concern for governments’ security and foreign policies and a corresponding academic interest in these developments, this book offers detailed insights into the German context. Germany has been denoted a latecomer but increasingly important actor in global health – and this book focuses on the assemblage of global health and foreign policy in this setting. The unique observation of Covid-19 in the German FFO highlights the crisis as exceptional and non-exceptional at the same time, making visible gaps in global health structures more generally. The vaccine donations during Covid-19 illustrate problematizations and technologies of global health as entangled with security and economic concerns.

For anyone interested in global health, both in academia and “in the field”, this book provides insights into governmental cooperation in the area of global health and foreign policy prior to and during a crisis, and allows for conclusions for further developments and/or future crisis moments.