Three years ago, the Lancet's frontispiece stated "Health is now the most important foreign policy issue of our time" and last year, the Director-General of WHO, Margaret Chan, in her opening address, to the Executive Board at its 132nd Session said "health diplomacy works". The nascent field of health diplomacy provides a political framework which aims to deliver the dual goals of improved hea...

Science diplomacy is the use of scientific collaborations among nations to address the common problems facing 21(st) century humanity and to build constructive international partnerships. There are many ways that scientists can contribute to this process.

a Graduate Institute of International Studies, rue de Lausanne 132, CH-1211 Geneva 21, Switzerland. Correspondence to this author (email: [email protected]). b Swiss Federal Office of Public Health, Berne, Switzerland. c Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Manquinhas, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Ref. No. 06-039222 (Submitted: 23 November 2006 – Accepted: 15 January 2007) Introduction “In the past” — said R...

The aim of this text is to review the research undertaken in Portugal on the question of the medieval royal chancellery and diplomacy and their relationship with the study of royal bureaucracy. In this sense, we characterize the lines of development that are to be noted in the research undertaken into political societies and royal power based on the records of the royal chancellery in the last ...

Since the creation of Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), health policies became a strategic factor in South America to collectively balance the legacy of neoliberal policies in the region. The aim of this article is first to describe the social, political, and economic processes that explain the emergence of UNASUR and its focus on social policy through healthcare. We then analyze how by...

Malaysia's global, regional and bilateral international health relations are surveyed against the historical backdrop of the country's foreign policy. Malaysia has always participated in multilateral agencies, most notably the World Health Organization, as such agencies are part of the longstanding fabric of "good international citizenship". The threats of infectious diseases to human health an...

In 2009, health authorities from Taiwan (under the name "Chinese Taipei")a formally attended the 62nd World Health Assembly (WHA) of the World Health Organization as observers, marking the country's participation for the first time since 1972. The long process of negotiating this breakthrough has been cited as an example of successful global health diplomacy. This paper analyses this negotiatio...