in this comment, i build on shiffman’s call for the global health community to more deeply investigate structural and productive power. i highlight two challenges we must grapple with as social scientists carrying out the types of investigation that shiffman proposes: the politics of  challenging the powerful; and the need to investigate types of expertise that have traditionally been thought o...

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The global health agenda has been dominating the current global health policy debate. Furthermore, it has compelled countries to embrace strategies for tackling health inequalities in a wide range of public health areas. The article by Robert and colleagues highlights that although globalization has increased opportunities to share and spread ideas, there is still great asymmetry of power accor...

in his perspective “navigating between stealth advocacy and unconscious dogmatism: the challenge of researching the norms, politics and power of global health,” ooms argues that actions taken in the field of global health are dependent not only on available resources, but on the normative premise that guides how these resources are spent. this comment sets out how the application of a predomina...

what counts as global health? there has been limited discourse to date on the ways in which country-level contexts may shape positioning in global health agendas. by reviewing japan’s response to the refugee crisis, we demonstrate a clash between rhetoric and action on global responsibility, and suggest that cultural and historical factors may be related to the ways of perceiving and acting upo...

brugha and bruen (2014) raise a number of compelling issues related to the interaction between politics and policy in the global health context. the first question that their views invite is whether this is, at heart, best characterized as a benign or malign influence. many commentators have suggested that this overlap should be discouraged (see, for example, marseille et al 2002; thomas & webe...

the paper published in the january 2015 issue of this journal by gusmano and colleagues entitled “shanghai rising: health improvements as measured by avoidable mortality since 2000” has spurred this commentary. we discuss controversial issues surrounding the concept of avoidable mortality in health service research in general and gusmano’s study in particular. the impact of overall social devel...

the grand challenge in global health is the inequality in mortality and life expectancy between countries and within countries. according to global health 2035, the lancet commission celebrating the 20th anniversary of the world development report (wdr) of 1993, the world now has the unique opportunity to achieve a grand convergence in global mortality within a generation. this article comments...

while the right to health is increasingly referenced in sustainable development goal (sdg) discussions, its contribution to global health and development remains subject to considerable debate. this hypothesis explores the potential influence of the right to health on the formulation of health goals in 4 major sdg reports. we analyse these reports through a social constructivist lens which view...