mayor and aldermen of the city of London put into place a set of orders " concerning the infection of the plague, " which was then sweeping through the population. He intended that these actions would be " very expedient for preventing and avoiding of infection of sickness " (1). At that time, London faced a public health crisis, with an inadequate scientific base in that the role of rats and t...

One of the more surprising features of the literature on public health and on health policy research in Europe and North America is the scarcity of references on the impact of political variables on health policy and on health outcomes. One can find in this literature a growing number of articles that focus on the social and cultural determinants of health, but very few indeed on the political ...

RATIONALE Public health policies are often dependent on political decision-making, but little is known of the impact of different forms of government on countries' health policies. In this exploratory study we studied the association between a wide range of process and outcome indicators of health policy and four groups of political factors (levels of democracy, e.g. voice and accountability; p...

Queerness is now global. Many emerging economies of the global South are experiencing queer mobilization and sexual identity politics raising fundamental questions of citizenship and human rights on the one hand; and discourses of nationalism, cultural identity, imperialism, tradition and family-values on the other. While some researchers argue that with economic globalization in the developing...

Actors working in global health often portray it as an enterprise grounded in principled concerns, advanced by individuals and organizations who draw on scientific evidence to pursue health equity. This portrait is incomplete. It is also a field of power relations-a social arena in which actors claim and draw on expertise and moral authority to gain influence and pursue career, organizational a...

Hannah Arendt’s existential, republican concept of politics spurned Carl Schmitt’s idea that enmity constituted the essence of the political. Famously, she isolated the political sphere from social conflict, sovereign regimes, and the realm of military violence. While some critics are now interested in applying Arendt’s more abstract political ideas to international affairs, it has not been ack...

As key economic, ecological and demographic trends converge to reshape Africa and its relationship with the outside world, a new politics is emerging in the twenty-first century around the water-food-energy nexus, which is central to the continent's relevance in the global economy. On the one hand, Malthusian anxieties are proliferating; pessimists link population growth and growing water scarc...