From Threat to Risk? Exceptionalism and Logics of Health Security

Abstract

The logic of “risk” is increasingly important in the study of global health politics. One recent contribution has even argued that risk is beginning to replace security as the defining logic of health governance and policy. Others dispute this on the basis that risk and security have always operated together in the “securitization” of disease. This article constitutes a theoretical intervention into this burgeoning debate. Does a stronger appreciation of risk warrant the diminishment of security? Are we looking at the “riskification” of health rather than “securitization”? Or would this miss the way these two logics might be complimentary or intertwined in ways that we are yet to theorize? I argue that the global health and securitization literatures are better served by an explicit consideration of risk and security logics in interplay, or never entirely encompassed by the other, nor in complete alignment, yet never truly separate. To do this, I propose a reconceptualization of the central problem—exceptionalism—that allows for risk to be understood as a form of exceptionalist politics. I demonstrate the validity of this approach through an otherwise “easy case” of securitization: the US response to the 2014–2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.