ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which health is increasingly linked to conceptions of security and insecurity in modern political discourses. Though related to broader discussions of human security and development, ‘health security’ has more recently emerged as a distinctive and burgeoning area of policy-making and research in its own right. The identification of health ‘risks’ such as global pandemics, infectious diseases, and the potential for the utilisation of biological agents as weapons in the form of ‘bioterrorism’have proliferated among the security policies and agendas of states, supranational institutions and non-governmental organisations alike. The following discussion outlines and assesses the multiple ways in which health is now constructed as a substantive security issue – ranging from the argument that infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS threaten militaries’ ability to maintain territorial security in sub-Saharan Africa, to more expansive conceptions of the relationship between health, security and populations at a broader level. Against this backdrop, it also critically evaluates a range of concepts and approaches found in Part I as a means for engaging with recent efforts to articulate and ‘contain’ health risks and reflecting more generally on the implications of the ‘medicalisation of (in)security’ for critical security studies.
