Abstract
Pharmaceuticals are now critical to the security of populations. Antivirals, antibiotics, next-generation vaccines, and antitoxins are just some of the new 'medical countermeasures' that governments are stockpiling in order to defend their populations against the threat of pandemics and bioterrorism. How has security policy come to be so deeply imbricated with pharmaceutical logics and solutions? This article captures, maps, and analyses the 'pharmaceuticalisation' of security. Through an in-depth analysis of the prominent antiviral medication Tamiflu, it shows that this pharmaceutical turn in security policy is intimately bound up with the rise of a molecular vision of life promulgated by the biomedical sciences. Caught in the crosshairs of powerful commercial, political, and regulatory pressures, governments are embracing a molecular biomedicine promising to secure populations pharmaceutically in the twenty-first century. If that is true, then the established disciplinary view of health as a predominantly secondary matter of 'low' international politics is mistaken. On the contrary, the social forces of health and biomedicine are powerful enough to influence the core practices of international politics - even those of security. For a discipline long accustomed to studying macrolevel processes and systemic structures, it is in the end also our knowledge of the minute morass of molecules that shapes international relations.
Highlights
The rapid rise of global health security as a new policy domain testifies to the increased attention that health issues are receiving in international politics
Antivirals, antibiotics, next-generation vaccines, and antitoxins are just some of the new ‘medical countermeasures’ that governments are stockpiling in order to defend their populations against the threat of pandemics and bioterrorism
Through an in-depth analysis of the prominent antiviral medication Tamiflu, it shows that this pharmaceutical turn in security policy is intimately bound up with the rise of a molecular vision of life promulgated by the biomedical sciences
Summary
The rapid rise of global health security as a new policy domain testifies to the increased attention that health issues are receiving in international politics. When the United Kingdom developed its first official national security strategy in 2008, it too began to highlight pandemic threats – both because of their ability to affect the country, and because they could potentially undermine international stability.[6] Pandemic threats continue to reside at the apex of the UK’s national risk register, and are identified as a Tier 1 (top) threat in the latest National Security Strategy.[7] Those UK efforts, in turn, unfolded against the backdrop of wider European Union initiatives to develop a European health security strategy.[8] In a way that would have been unimaginable only a decade ago, potentially catastrophic infectious disease threats have become the unlikely bedfellows of more established security threats like terrorism, nuclear proliferation, rogue states, and so forth.[9] The emergence of those global health security concerns creates new challenges and opportunities for International Relations scholarship. Looking more closely at the role of pharmaceuticals in security policy reveals that, far from being tangential to international studies, health and medicine play a constitutive role in our understandings, analyses, and practices of international relations.[13]
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