Contradiction Studies

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

Article / Paper

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

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power and resistance

“Michel Foucault says: “Where there is power, there is resistance, and […] this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (History of Sexuality I, The Will to Knowledge, 1976, p. 95)”

Gisela Febel
sustained engagement

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

Norman Sieroka
Bhabha on enlightenment and coloniality

“Homi Bhabha says about the contradiction between the ideals of the enlightenment, claims to democracy and solidarity and simultaneous colonization and ongoing coloniality: ‘That ideological tension, visible in the history of the West as a despotic power, at the very moment of the birth of democracy and modernity, has not been adequately written in a contradictory and contrapuntal discourse of tradition.’”

Kerstin Knopf
idea of democratic critique

“If you think that acts of contradicting someone always need to point to better solutions, you haven’t really understood the idea of democratic critique.”

Martin Nonhoff
space

“According to Niklas Luhmann, space is a ‘special facility to negate contradictions’”.

Julia Lossau