ABSTRACT
Examining the place of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) on the health security agenda is fundamentally a diagnosis of absence. Despite claims that the threats posed by infectious disease are distinct from traditional state-based enemies, the construction of disease as a security threat in the discourse does little to validate this argument. While disease has been omnipresent across human history, it has only relatively recently become part of the security studies literature as an issue other than its ramifications as a weapon, or the implications of war for population health. To assert that infectious diseases are favored in this discourse is to recognize that they, more than NCDs, are compatible with existing modes of conceptualizing and providing for security. There are multiple ways in which this is manifest; one is that infectious diseases have historically demonstrated transformative power capable of restructuring modes of political and economic organization.
