Critical Health Geopolitics: (Un)healthy spaces of the COVID-19 pandemic

Critical Health Geopolitics (CHG) is an analytical framework that offers opportunities for making sense of the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath. It links geopolitical research with health research, and reapplies them to the pandemic and post-pandemic world with an eye to how geopolitical power is exercised. The framework encourages researchers and policy-makers to detect and reflect upon the intersectionality of governance, political ecologies, cultural legacies, social and spatial mobilities, and biopolitics. This paper uses case studies to show how a CHG lens can: investigate the dangers of ignoring geopolitical legacies and histories of structural inequality when planning public health interventions; focus on how decisions made in response to COVID-19 exacerbated political and colonial legacies and structural inequalities; and consider how filtering COVID-19 mitigations and policies through a nationalistic framing impacts on satisfaction (or not) with national and supernational policies. CHG also has the potential to act as a multiplier and amplifier of health surveillance and intrusion, identifying why some individuals, populations and thus the areas in which they live may be more vulnerable to disease, and to resisting the control of disease, than others. Furthermore, it offers the most appropriate lens through which to focus research, drawing component fields together to create stronger and deeper understandings of health (in)justice, pandemic preparedness and global health.