ABSTRACT
Scholarly engagement with health securitisation has been recognised in recent research literature on health governance. Yet this research has paid little attention to the broader contextual factors that enable this security framing to occur. The usage, and effects, of digital mapping during health crises in particular have been overlooked as to the impact towards ‘securitising’ governance responses. This chapter focuses on the 2014/15 West African Ebola outbreak and contends that Ebola came to be understood as a security issue due to the reiteration of narrow Western conceptions of risk that were contributed to by the use of digital maps. The use of these maps amplified notions of risk, enabling Western elites to define and govern the global health response from a Western-centric security perspective. In doing so, this chapter also highlights the importance of the possibilities of attenuating such risk through the use of digital mapping to challenge the dominant Western-centric power structures that govern the global response to health crises.
