Understanding the Politics of Pandemic Scares
Understanding the Politics of Pandemic Scares

Author: Mika Aaltola

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-01-30

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1136650156

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Reactions to pandemics are unlike any other global emergency; with an emphasis on withdrawal and containment of the sight of the infected. Dealing with the historical and conceptual background of diseases in politics and international relations, this volume investigates the global political reaction to pandemic scares. By evaluating anxiety and the political response to pandemics as a legitimisation of the modern state and its ability to protect its citizens from infectious disease, Understanding the Politics of Pandemic Scares examines the connection between international health governance and the emerging Western liberal world order. The case studies, including SARS, Bird Flu and Swine Flu, provide an understanding of how the world order, global health governance and people’s bodies interact to produce scares and panics. Aaltola introduces an innovative new concept of ‘politosomatics’ based on the relationship that links individual stress, strain, and fear with global circulations of power to evaluate increasingly global bio-political environments in which pandemics exist. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of International Relations, Global Health, International Public Health and Global Health governance.

Understanding the Politics of Pandemic Scares
Understanding the Politics of Pandemic Scares

Author: Mika Aaltola

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2011-07-13

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1136650164

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Reactions to pandemics are unlike any other global emergency; with an emphasis on withdrawal and containment of the sight of the infected. Dealing with the historical and conceptual background of diseases in politics and international relations, this volume investigates the global political reaction to pandemic scares. By evaluating anxiety and the political response to pandemics as a legitimisation of the modern state and its ability to protect its citizens from infectious disease, Understanding the Politics of Pandemic Scares examines the connection between international health governance and the emerging Western liberal world order. The case studies, including SARS, Bird Flu and Swine Flu, provide an understanding of how the world order, global health governance and people’s bodies interact to produce scares and panics. Aaltola introduces an innovative new concept of ‘politosomatics’ based on the relationship that links individual stress, strain, and fear with global circulations of power to evaluate increasingly global bio-political environments in which pandemics exist. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of International Relations, Global Health, International Public Health and Global Health governance.

Understanding the Politics of Pandemic Emergencies in the time of COVID-19
Understanding the Politics of Pandemic Emergencies in the time of COVID-19

Author: Mika Aaltola

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-05-04

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1000532224

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This book reviews the political significance of COVID-19 in the context of earlier pandemic encounters and scares to understand the ways in which it challenges the existing individual health, domestic order, international health governance actors, and, more fundamentally, the circulation-based modus operandi of the present world order. It argues that contagious diseases should be regarded as complex open-ended phenomena with various features and are not reducible merely to biology and epidemiology. They are, as such, fundamentally politosomatic, namely that they disrupt, agitate, and trigger large-scale processes because individual somatic-level anxieties stem from individuals’ sensing immediate danger through the networks of their local and global connectedness. The author further argues that pandemics have somatic effects in political expressions that transform the epidemic into national security dramas which should not, for the sake of efficient health governance, be treated as aspects extraneous to the disease itself. The book highlights that when a serious infectious disease spreads, a 'threat' is very often externalized into a culturally meaningful 'foreign' entity. Pandemics tend to be territorialized, nationalized, ethnicized, and racialized. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of global health and governance, pandemic security, epidemics, history of medicine, geopolitics, international relations, and general readers interested in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rage
Rage

Author: Bob Woodward

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2020-09-15

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 1982131764

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Rage is an unprecedented and intimate tour de force of new reporting on the Trump presidency facing a global pandemic, economic disaster and racial unrest. Woodward, the #1 international bestselling author of Fear: Trump in the White House, has uncovered the precise moment the president was warned that the Covid-19 epidemic would be the biggest national security threat to his presidency. In dramatic detail, Woodward takes readers into the Oval Office as Trump’s head pops up when he is told in January 2020 that the pandemic could reach the scale of the 1918 Spanish Flu that killed 675,000 Americans. In 17 on-the-record interviews with Woodward over seven volatile months—an utterly vivid window into Trump’s mind—the president provides a self-portrait that is part denial and part combative interchange mixed with surprising moments of doubt as he glimpses the perils in the presidency and what he calls the “dynamite behind every door.” At key decision points, Rage shows how Trump’s responses to the crises of 2020 were rooted in the instincts, habits and style he developed during his first three years as president. Revisiting the earliest days of the Trump presidency, Rage reveals how Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats struggled to keep the country safe as the president dismantled any semblance of collegial national security decision making. Rage draws from hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand witnesses as well as participants’ notes, emails, diaries, calendars and confidential documents. Woodward obtained 25 never-seen personal letters exchanged between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who describes the bond between the two leaders as out of a “fantasy film.” Trump insists to Woodward he will triumph over Covid-19 and the economic calamity. “Don’t worry about it, Bob. Okay?” Trump told the author in July. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll get to do another book. You’ll find I was right.”

Law and Global Health
Law and Global Health

Author: Michael Freeman

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2014-05-29

Total Pages: 666

ISBN-13: 0191003468

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Current Legal Issues, like its sister volume Current Legal Problems (now available in journal format), is based upon an annual colloquium held at University College London. Each year leading scholars from around the world gather to discuss the relationship between law and another discipline of thought. Each colloquium examines how the external discipline is conceived in legal thought and argument, how the law is pictured in that discipline, and analyses points of controversy in the use, and abuse, of extra-legal arguments within legal theory and practice. Law and Global Health, the sixteenth volume in the Current Legal Issues series, offers an insight into the scholarship examining the relationship between global health and the law. Covering a wide range of areas from all over the world, articles in the volume look at areas of human rights, vulnerable populations, ethical issues, legal responses and governance.

Community, Economy and COVID-19
Community, Economy and COVID-19

Author: Clifford J. Shultz, II

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-08-23

Total Pages: 667

ISBN-13: 3030981525

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This volume explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the health, safety, and socioeconomic well-being of community residents of selected countries around the world. It is built on an overarching framework of studying community well-being, applied here to the analyses of one of the most significant crises of our time. Most important are the lessons learned from the experiences in these countries – including insights and recommendations on how to mitigate future pandemics. Building on years of research, each chapter is written by an accomplished scholar with interests and expertise on various assessments of community well-being development in the country of study. The authors share cases and analyses, and highlight failures and successes; they offer sound policy recommendations on how to restore the health, safety, and multidimensional wellness of community residents, and how to decrease the likelihood and impact of future crises. Some of the policy recommendations in this multi-country compendium can be used to assist crisis prevention and recovery, beyond pandemics. The volume shows how the lessons learned and shared from community responses to the pandemic can provide critical and useful policy insights to shape best practices in mitigating other disasters like hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, wars, riots, acts of domestic and international terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and industrial accidents. This is a must-read for researchers across the social sciences, health sciences, and management studies, and for government and non-government professionals involved in community health and well-being.

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story
The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

Author: Michael Lewis

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2021-05-04

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 0393881563

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New York Times Bestseller For those who could read between the lines, the censored news out of China was terrifying. But the president insisted there was nothing to worry about. Fortunately, we are still a nation of skeptics. Fortunately, there are those among us who study pandemics and are willing to look unflinchingly at worst-case scenarios. Michael Lewis’s taut and brilliant nonfiction thriller pits a band of medical visionaries against the wall of ignorance that was the official response of the Trump administration to the outbreak of COVID-19. The characters you will meet in these pages are as fascinating as they are unexpected. A thirteen-year-old girl’s science project on transmission of an airborne pathogen develops into a very grown-up model of disease control. A local public-health officer uses her worm’s-eye view to see what the CDC misses, and reveals great truths about American society. A secret team of dissenting doctors, nicknamed the Wolverines, has everything necessary to fight the pandemic: brilliant backgrounds, world-class labs, prior experience with the pandemic scares of bird flu and swine flu…everything, that is, except official permission to implement their work. Michael Lewis is not shy about calling these people heroes for their refusal to follow directives that they know to be based on misinformation and bad science. Even the internet, as crucial as it is to their exchange of ideas, poses a risk to them. They never know for sure who else might be listening in.

The Politics and Policies of Relief, Aid and Reconstruction
The Politics and Policies of Relief, Aid and Reconstruction

Author: Fulvio Attina

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2012-10-15

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1137026731

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Disaster policies present a new challenge to the practitioners and students of global politics; this book explains how political science enriches the contribution of the social sciences to the study of disaster relief, aid and reconstruction following the major disaster events, both natural and man-made, of recent times.

Security, Emancipation and the Politics of Health
Security, Emancipation and the Politics of Health

Author: Joao Nunes

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-01

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13: 1134578431

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This book develops a new theoretical framework for the study of security issues and applies this to the case of health. Building on the work of the ‘Welsh School’ of Security Studies, and drawing on contributions from the wider critical security literature, the book provides an emancipatory perspective on the health-security nexus – one which simultaneously teases out its underlying political assumptions, assesses its political effects and identifies potential for transformation. Security, Emancipation and the Politics of Health challenges conventional wisdom in the field of health and international politics by conceiving of health as a fundamentally political issue, and not merely as a medical problem demanding ‘technical’ solutions and arrangements. The book shows how political processes of representation underpin notions of health and disease through an examination of three key areas: the linkages between immigration and the fear of disease; colonial medicine; and the ‘health as a bridge for peace’ literature. In order to successfully carry out this political investigation of health, the book develops an innovative theoretical framework inspired by the idea of ‘security as emancipation’, which goes beyond the existing emancipatory literature in security studies. This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, health politics, sociology and IR in general.

Post-Pandemic Welfare and Social Work
Post-Pandemic Welfare and Social Work

Author: Goetz Ottmann

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-08-04

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1000921573

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The COVID-19 pandemic represents a critical juncture in the development of the welfare state affirming its importance for its citizens’ economic, health and wellbeing, and safety, especially for its most vulnerable populations. It demonstrated that the crisis preparedness that is crucial for an effective protection of its citizens, the ultimate purpose of the welfare state, unquestionably exceeds the narrow horizon of a corporatised welfare industry with its singular focus on the maximisation of profit for the elites and cost containment for the government. Social workers need to engage with the contradictions and tensions that spring from underfunded welfare services and engage in the political struggle over a well-resourced welfare state. Contributors to this book take on this challenge. By tracing the various contradictions of the pandemic, the contributors reflect on new ways of thinking about welfare by exploring what to keep, what to challenge and what to change. By highlighting important challenges for a social justice-focused response as well as exploring the many challenges exposed by the pandemic facing social work for the coming decades, contributors critically outline pathways in social work that might contribute to the shaping of a less cruel and more capable welfare state. Using case-studies from Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia, Italy, Slovenia, Estonia, Sweden, Spain, South Africa, Canada, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, China and the United States, the book features 19 chapters by leading experts. This book will be of interest to all social work scholars, students and practitioners, as well as those working in social policy and health more broadly.