Interventions in critical health geopolitics: Borders, rights, and conspiracies in the COVID-19 pandemic

Within health and medical geography, the politics of health and medicine has often been under-appreciated, undertheorized and underexplored. Given the emerging geopolitical questions brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, we ask how a ‘critical health geopolitics’ might be conceptualized, theorized and scaled from the global to the local. In doing so, we consider how existing research can be remobilized and applied to the (post)pandemic world, whether directly in relation to COVID, or indirectly in relation to shifting relationships between states, publics and international bodies (as manifested, for instance, in global health governance, security-driven emergency measures, health-care privatization ventures and health activism). Efforts to contain the pandemic and to create a long-term solution through vaccines have intersected with a range of political issues relating to healthcare systems, political representation, human rights, sovereignty, mobility, and borders. More than just the topic of the moment, then, the pandemic is an opportunity for political geography to take seriously the geopolitical underpinnings of health, healthcare systems, and medicine.