Ambivalenzen der Sorge von Global Health Security und das Problem der response-ability

Through qualitative analysis of materials from ethnographic observations and governance documents, and along an analytic framework of infrastructure, this paper examines the ambivalences of care in and of Global Health Security. Global Health Security’s occupation with preparing health systems for an appropriate emergency response is accompanied by the problem of allocating responsibility for this preparedness capacity buildup. The paper argues that a universalist narrative of globally shared vulnerability to infectious disease threats drives Global Health Security as a global governance programme. It is shown how this narrative securitizes existing vulnerabilities in health infrastructures and how Global Health Security thereby functions as a reflexivization of former infrastructural adjustment programmes, which co-constituted these vulnerabilites in the first place. Against the backdrop of the problematic emergency response to the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the concept of response-ability – developed in neo-materialist and posthumanist feminism – helps to contour the ambivalences of Global Health Security’s care. While certain infrastructural vulnerabilities and provisional needs are being addressed, the caring security employed in Global Health fails to respond to other, obvious infrastructural vulnerabilities.