Contradiction Studies

Towards Equity and Decolonization? An Introduction into the Blog Debate on the World Health System after the Pandemic

Contribution

Lilli Hasche, Jelena von Achenbach & Andreas Fischer-Lescano

2024

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed systemic problems in the global health system. It revealed that the global health system perpetuates global health inequalities rather than effectively reducing them: The international community, particularly the countries of the Global North, failed to make COVID-19 vaccines widely available to the populations of the world’s poorest countries. This blog debate takes stock of the reform debate about a just and decolonizing transformation of the health system. Bringing together scholars from various disciplines, the contributions of this debate ask what a fair global health system could look like and what role the law plays in it.

Verfassungsblog

DEBATE: The World Health System After the Pandemic: Towards Equity and Decolonization?

DOI: 10.59704/6aede02d2c17cb85

Back to overview
sustained engagement

“The history of Western philosophy can be understood as a sustained engagement with contradiction.”

Norman Sieroka
driver

“Contradictions are an important driver of scientific practice and knowledge.”

Norman Sieroka
every day

“Living in contradictions is what we experience every day. Why do we know so little about it?”

Gisela Febel
Afterlife of colonialism

“Contradiction comes in many different forms. None is so debilitating than when the coloniser transitions, textually not politically, to decoloniality without taking the responsibility for the afterlife of colonialism, which they continue to benefit from. Self-examination and self-interrogation of the relations of coloniality, a necessity, seem nearly impossible for the coloniser who continues to act as beneficiary, masked in the new-found language of White fragility, devoid of an ethical responsibility of the very system of White domination they claim to be against.” (Black Consciousness and the Politics of the Flesh)

Rozena Maart
hierarchy of norms

“If social contradictions are reflected in law, law cannot form a hierarchy of norms free of contradictions.”

Andreas Fischer-Lescano