Fighting Pandemics from Below. New Diplomatic Histories of Global North – South Public Health Cooperation

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the inadequacy of health cooperation between the so-called global north and south had dire and lethal consequences for humanity. The rapid spread of the disease, alarming death rates and governments’ unilateral agendas led to repeated calls from health experts for collaborative action across the globe. Instead, the world has witnessed heightened geopolitical rivalries, reproduction of Orientalist binaries and vaccine inequity that deprioritize health as a global public good. Today, health practitioners and scholars across disciplines agree that building new coordination mechanisms and, by this means, strengthening the capacity of local community groups in lower-income countries is crucial to stamp out communicable diseases. While these appeals are in line with the mantra of humanitarian efforts since the World Humanitarian Summit of 2016, ‘as local as possible, as international as necessary’, there is still limited consensus as to how we can induce and sustain localised sanitary internationalism.

With these pressing issues in mind, we would like to invite historians of diplomacy, medicine, IR, empires, and other related fields to turn to the guidance of the past. The ‘Fighting Pandemics from Below’ international conference will be organized at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, on 30 September – 1 October 2027 by ERC COOPERATION project team with the support of the Quarantine Studies Network. In this conference, we will discuss histories of localised sanitary internationalism with a view to publishing an edited volume.

Keynote speaker: Professor Khaled Fahmy