The Pharmaceuticalization of Security: Molecular Biomedicine, Antiviral Stockpiles and Global Health Security
- Date: Thursday 6 November 2014, 16:00 – 17:30
- Location: Social Sciences Building
- Type: Seminars
- Cost: Free
How has security policy come to be so deeply imbricated with pharmaceutical logics and solutions?
You are invited to the POLIS seminar by Professor Stefan Elbe. The seminar will take place on Thursday 6th November in 14.33, Social Sciences Building at 4-5:30 pm. Stefan’s abstract is below. PhD researchers, you are very welcome and strongly encouraged to attend. Also, I'd really like to encourage MA researchers to attend.
Please do come along to what promises to be a fascinating talk.
Abstract
Pharmaceuticals are now critical to the security of populations. Antivirals, antibiotics, next-generation vaccines and anti-toxins are just some of the new ‘medical countermeasures’ that governments are stockpiling in order to defend their populations against the threat of pandemics and bioterrorism. So, how has security policy come to be so deeply imbricated with pharmaceutical logics and solutions? This article captures, maps and analyses the ‘pharmaceuticalization’ of security. Through an in-depth analysis of the prominent antiviral medication Tamiflu, it shows that this pharmaceutical turn in security policy is intimately bound up with the rise of a molecular vision of life promulgated by the biomedical sciences. Caught in the crosshairs of powerful commercial, political and regulatory pressures, governments are embracing a molecular biomedicine promising to secure populations pharmaceutically in the twenty-first century. If that is true, then the established disciplinary view of health as a predominantly secondary matter of ‘low’ international politics is mistaken. On the contrary, the social forces of health and biomedicine are powerful enough to influence the core practices of international politics – even those of security. For a discipline long accustomed to studying macro-level processes and systemic structures, it is in the end also our knowledge of the minute morass of molecules that shapes international relations. There will be an opportunity for networking after the talk.