Infrastructuring Global Health Security: Technicalities of Administrative Technologies

• In Event: Sensing Security: Sensing and the Making of Transnational Security Infrastructures - II

Abstract

The Ebola Crisis in West Africa in 2014-2016 showed that the recently established apparatus of so called Global Health Security wasn't able to “secure” “global” “health”. Since then, administrative and national health systems are increasingly targeted as critical infrastructure for Global Health Security.

While tech-y infrastructures (informational systems, energy supply, etc.) have been key issues for STS and Security Studies for two decades, the technicalities of fussy administrative infastructures and infrastructuring through administration didn’t gain as much attention. And while analyzing Global Health Security along terms of critical infrastructure isn’t news for Security Studies, investigating the actual technicalities of technocratic and administrative security practices along the lines of STS opens up the operative dimension of Global Health Security as a project of governing through infrastructure. In light of this (gap at the) intersection of Security Studies and STS, the presentation investigates the new mode of Global Health Security along the technicalities of administrative infrastructuring.
It will therefore draw on ethnographic field work on the newly introduced so called Joint External Evaluations, a procedure facilitated by the World Health Organization. They aim at producing numeric data about national implemenation of the International Health Regulations, the central international law on Global Health. The process of evaluation and it’s standardized procedure however achieve more than just producing objective knowledge about national preparedness capacities: they project, format and operationalize prospective steps of capacity building. Here Global Health Security materializes and becomes operative through technocratic and administrative technologies, and administrative forms develop infrastructural quality.

Author

• Carolin Mezes, Philipps-University Marburg