The role of EU health attachés for global health diplomacy in times of COVID-19

Abstract

ABSTRACT While practitioners around the globe deal with the challenges posed by COVID-19, scholars of diplomacy were wondering where did all the health attachés go? Reviewing the scholarship on global health diplomacy shows, on the one hand, that health attachés are at the core of global health diplomacy while on the other, data about their role and impact is lacking. International diplomatic negotiations on health take place at the bilateral and multilateral level and rely on diplomats – and it is the health attachés that have the highest level of legitimacy. The fact that an empirical repository on these diplomats is missing comes as a surprise as at the regional level of diplomacy – the European Union – there is a considerable network of health attachés in place since the 1980s. Against this background this articles explores five distinct roles that EU health attachés embrace in Brussels and its implications for health diplomacy.