Moving Health Sovereignty In Africa

Today’s era of intense globalization has unleashed dynamic movements of people, pathogens, and pests that overwhelm the static territorial jurisdictions on which the governance provided by sovereign states and their formal intergovernmental institutions is based. This world of movement calls for new ideas and institutions to govern people’s health, above all in Africa, where the movements and health challenges are the most acute. This book insightfully explores these challenges in ways that put the perspectives of Africans themselves at centre stage. It begins with the long central and still compelling African health challenge of combating the pandemic of HIV/AIDS. It then examines the global governance responses by the major multilateral organizations of the World Bank and the World Trade Organization and the newer informal flexible democratically oriented ones of the Group of Eight. It also addresses the compounding health challenge created by climate change to assess both its intensifying impact on Africa and how all international institutions have largely failed to link climate and health in their governance response. It concludes with several recommendations about the innovative ideas and institutions that offer a way to closing the great global governance gaps and thus improving Africans’ health and that of citizens beyond.

This volume addresses the ideational and policy-oriented challenges of Africa’s health governance due to voluntary and involuntary cross-border migration of people and diseases in a growing 'mobile Africa'. The collected set of specialized contributions in this volume examines how national and regional policy innovation can address the competing conception of sovereignty in dealing with Africa’s emerging healthcare problems in a fast-paced, interconnect world.

This volume addresses the ideational and policy-oriented challenges of Africa’s health governance due to voluntary and involuntary cross-border migration of people and diseases in a growing 'mobile Africa'. The collected set of specialized contributions in this volume examines how national and regional policy innovation can address the competing conception of sovereignty in dealing with Africa’s emerging healthcare problems in a fast-paced, interconnect world.

This book deals with Israeli development aid to Sub-Saharan Africa countries as a part of Israeli foreign policy. The analysis is framed by the concept of soft power: an assumption that development cooperation increases attractiveness of the donor and contributes to constructive bilateral and multilateral relations. Israel is a particular case of a donor, as it concentrates on technical aid and its aid is motivated by a particular set of ideological and pragmatic motives.Covering the period since the 1950s till today, the book analyses particular Israeli resources relevant for African development and the system and contents of Israeli development aid, with a particular focus on a new phenomenon of the engagement of businesses and NGOs.Zielińska explores the geopolitical context of Israeli aid for Sub-Saharan countries and the recipients’ perception of Israeli aid; asking if and how these attitudes influence the recipients’ behaviour towards Israel within their bilateral relations as well as on multilateral forums. Contributing to the knowledge of development diplomacy as a form of expression of soft power and as a tool of foreign policy, it will be of interest to international relations’ students and faculty as well as to other people professionally dealing with Israeli foreign policies.

This edition originally published: 2017.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

This book focuses on Africa’s challenges, achievements, and failures over the past several centuries using an interdisciplinary approach that combines theory and fact and evidence-based practices and interventions in public health, and argues that most of the health problems in Africa are not a result of scarce or lack of resources, but of the misconceived and misplaced priorities that have left the continent behind every other on the globe in terms of health, education, and equitable distribution of opportunities and access to (quality) health as agreed by the United Nations member states at Alma-Ata in 1978.

COVID-19 has exposed the racialized nature of food systems, but also potentially grants opportunities to build anew. Maywa Montenegro explores a series of breakdowns, from fractured supply chains to uncontrolled infection among essential food workers to Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities scythed through by the virus along old grooves of race-class oppression. She traces the likely origins of COVID-19 to spillover sites forged by agroindustrial expansion into forested regions where pathogens spring free and infect humans. Industrial animal agriculture drives these ecological changes that incubate future outbreaks. Pandemics have their roots in the violent separation of communities from their territories, seeds, knowledge and wealth. Racism enables such theft as fundamental to capitalist expansion. To tackle pandemics and food injustices, Montenegro calls for an abolitionist agroecology. No anti-capitalist alternative can ignore the racism that is central to the transnational industrial food system. Scholars including Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Mariame Kaba have argued that although abolition is frequently seen as an oppositional strategy - to eradicate, for example, prisons and police - abolition is equally propositional. An abolitionist agroecology cracks open multiple possibilities that respond to the exigencies of a pandemic planet - there is no 'normal' to which we can safely return.