Health securitization and (in)security of the constitutional order

Mirko Bilandžić ()
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Mirko Bilandžić: Department of Sociology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb

International Studies, 2021, vol. 21, issue 1, 11-22

Abstract: The link between public health, medicine and safety is not a novelty. The abundance of factual empiricism points to the similarities between warfare technology and medicine: both are population‑oriented, strategically important, and they produce security. After all, public health has uses in two areas: warfare and the welfare state. Modern medicine has been developed as a result of action in both areas, as a means of defending the society and as a means of raising the level of well‑being of the population. Historically, the safety aspects of medicine and health have been empirically indisputable, although diseases and the health of people and nations have been predominantly treated as issues of health, medicine and development. Redefined security paradigms in the post‑Cold War period placed (infectious) diseases on a pedestal of security challenges. On January 10, 2000, for the first time in history, the UN Security Council declared a health issue – HIV/AIDS – a threat to international peace and security. The global AIDS pandemic has since become not just a global health and development issue, but one with important security implications: it has direct and indirect effects on human security, social security, national and international security. The issue of health obtained such an empirical confirmation when the COVID‑19 pandemic was proclaimed a significant threat to peace and security. At the beginning of the 21st century, health is securitized, marked by a threat that calls into question our very existence, requiring urgent and special measures to protect and secure the object (health) that is exposed to the threat. Extension of repressive state powers and introduction of “the state of exception,” or state of emergency, in response to threats in redefined security conditions are becoming, or have already become (as in the case of “war on terror”), a permanent norm. In the face of new risks, known security mechanisms are deficient. Exceptions become the rule, and there is a gradual “normalization of emergency.” In the era of health securitization, the line between health and safety enforcement policies has been blurred. Health security thus conditions the transformation of political powers into forms of “institutionalized excellence”. Is the securitization of health leading to the (in)security of the constitutional order?

Keywords: constitutional order; state of emergency; security; securitization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:awd:intstu:v:21:y:2021:i:1:p:11-22

DOI: 10.46672/ms.21.1.1

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