Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-11T10:26:06.179Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘Choking the national demos’: research partnerships and the material constitution of global health

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 May 2021

John Harrington
John Harrington*
Affiliation:
Professor of Global Health Law, Cardiff University, UK
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: HarringtonJ3@cardiff.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

By foregrounding a widened view of the rule of law in transnational legal processes, the works under discussion in this symposium can support innovative critical perspectives on global health law –a field that has gained wide attention due to the spread of COVID-19 around the world (Lander, 2020; Bhatt, 2020). Legal and socio-legal scholars in the decade and a half before the pandemic worked on locating global health law and articulating its underlying principles. Lawrence Gostin's 2014 monograph offers a synoptic view centred on international institutions (e.g. the World Health Organization, World Trade Organization, UN Human Rights Council) and problems (e.g. infectious-disease response, tobacco control), along with an elaboration of its normative basis in universal moral principle and international human rights law (Gostin, 2014). Struggles over access to essential medicines and intellectual property in the early 2000s are, for example, represented in terms of the right to health constraining international trade law. Andreas Fischer-Lescano and Guenther Teubner's 2004 reading is oriented more by social theory than by doctrinal or ethical frames (Fischer-Lescano and Teubner, 2004, pp. 1006, 1008). A functional health regime has ‘differentiated out’, they observe, and operates as a discrete communication system across borders, albeit one that is threatened by the preponderant economic system. On this model, the battle for access to medicines amounts to ensuring, via human rights guarantees, that the rationality of the health system is not replaced by that of its economic rival in legal and policy communications (Fischer-Lescano and Teubner, 2004, pp. 1030, 1046).

Type
Reviews Symposium
Information
International Journal of Law in Context , Volume 17 , Special Issue 1: Celebration of Peter Fitzpatrick and his Scholarship , March 2021 , pp. 122 - 127
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson, GW (2014) Constitutionalism as a critical project: the epistemological challenge to politics. In Gill, S and Cutler, AC (eds), New Constitutionalism and World Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 281–294.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bhatt, K (2020) Concessionaires, Financiers and Communities: Implementing Indigenous Peoples’ Rights to Land in Transnational Development Projects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Botti, L et al. (2018) Equality in health research cooperation between Africa and Europe: the potential of the Research Fairness Initiative. In Cherry, A et al. (eds), Africa-Europe Research and Innovation Cooperation. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 99–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carbonnier, G and Kontinen, T (2014) North–South Research Partnership. Academia Meets Development? EADI Policy Paper Series. Bonn: European Association of Development Research and Training Institute.Google Scholar
Crane, JT (2013) Scrambling for Africa: AIDS, Expertise, and the Rise of American Global Health Science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Elliott, D (2017) Transnational scientific projects and racial politics: the KEMRI Six case against the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme in contemporary Kenya. Medizinethnologie Blog, 7 August 2017. Available at https://www.medizinethnologie.net/the-kemri-six-case/ (accessed 8 September 2020).Google Scholar
Escobar, A (1995) Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Fischer-Lescano, A and Teubner, G (2004) Regime-collisions: the vain search for legal unity in the fragmentation of global law. Michigan Journal of International Law 25, 999–1046.Google Scholar
Geissler, PW (2015) Introduction: a life science in its African para-state. In Geissler, PW (ed.), Para-states and Medical Science: Making African Global Health. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–25.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gostin, L (2014) Global Health Law. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harmer, A and Buse, K (2009) Global health partnerships: the mosh-pit of global health governance. In Buse, K, Hein, W and Draeger, N (eds), Making Sense of Global Health Governance: The Policy Perspective. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 75–86.Google Scholar
Harrington, J (2018) ‘We can't wait for the bugs to spread’: rhetorics of time, space and biosecurity in global health law. Transnational Legal Theory 9, 85–112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harrington, J and O'Hare, A (2014) Framing the national interest: debating intellectual property and access to essential medicines in Kenya. Journal of World Intellectual Property 17, 16–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kenya Medical Research Institute (2016) Strategic Plan KEMRI – Wellcome Trust Research Programme 2016–2021. Available at https://kemri-wellcome.org/zp-content/uploads/2016/02/Strategic-Plan-2016-2021-v6.pdf (accessed 3 September 2020).Google Scholar
Koh, HH (1996) Transnational legal process. Nebraska Law Review 75, 181–215.Google Scholar
Krajewska, A (2018) Transnational health law beyond the public-private divide: the case of reproductive rights. Journal of Law and Society 45, S220–S243.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lander, J (2020) Transnational Law and State Transformation: The Case of Extractive Development in Mongolia. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Marais, D et al. (2013) Where There Is No Lawyer: Guidance for Fairer Contract Negotiation in Collaborative Research Partnerships. Geneva: Council on Health Research for Development.Google Scholar
McPherson, W (1999) The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Report of an Inquiry by Sir William McPherson. Cmnd 4262-I. London: TSO.Google Scholar
Merry, SE (2006) Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Nzomo, V (2014) KEMRI ordered to pay researchers 30 million shillings for constitutional infringement of intellectual property rights, IP-Kenya Blog, 25 July. Available at https://ipkenya.wordpress.com/tag/dr-samson-gwer-5-others-v-kenya-medical-research-institute-kemri-2-others/ (accessed 8 September 2020).Google Scholar
Ombongi, K (2011) The historical interface between the state and medical science in Africa: Kenya's case. In Geissler, PW and Molyneux, C (eds), Evidence, Ethos and Experiment: The Anthropology and History of Medical Research in Africa. New York/Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 353–369.Google Scholar
Petryna, A (2009) When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects. Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sack, DA et al. (2009) Improving international research contracting. Bulletin of the World Health Organization 87, 487.Google ScholarPubMed
Schneiderman, D (2008) Constitutionalising Economic Globalisation: Investment Rules and Democracy's Promise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Teubner, G (1990) ‘And God laughed’: indeterminacy, self-reference and paradox in law. Stanford Literature Review 7, 1–35.Google Scholar
Tichenor, M (2016) The power of data: global malaria governance and the Senegalese data retention strike. In Adams, V (ed.), Metrics: What Counts in Global Health. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 105–124.Google Scholar
Tilley, H (2011) Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire Development and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Toussignant, N (2013) Broken tempos: of means and memory in a Senegalese laboratory. Social Studies of Science 43, 729–751.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zumbansen, P (2012) Defining the space of transnational law: legal theory, global governance, and legal pluralism. Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems 21, 305–334.Google Scholar