[COOPERATION, ERC-2023-COG, 101125306]

ERC COOPERATION project recaptures the lost archives and historical knowledge of international public health cooperation between the so-called ‘Global North’ and the ‘Global South’ by analysis of its first and longest-lasting instances: the sanitary councils in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Established in Tangier, Alexandria, Tunis, Istanbul and Tehran, these unprecedented institutions fought against waves of epidemics and pandemics between the 1790s and the 1940s. Their European, American and native co-founders invented new models for fighting pandemics from below and stopping the diseases in their tracks. All along, they strove to overcome the familiar barriers to cooperation posed by inter-imperial competition in a multipolar world, economic inequities, protests against quarantine restrictions, and racial and Orientalist biases, among others.

Our team examines the entangled and transimperial histories of public health cooperation, shifting the narrative from West-centric, top-down approaches to a more nuanced view of bottom-up processes. We explore the preconditions for (effective) international public health cooperation in MENA uncovering how north-south collaboration relied not only on Great Power dominance or covert imperialism but also on reciprocal actions on the ground. Our project will disclose that the agency of local actors and smaller and middle European powers in accrediting public health cooperation was more central than has been documented to this date and measure the councils’ success/failure by assessing their endurance, legitimacy and performance and consulting previously untapped archival sources in Europe, MENA, North America and Russia.