Face A Face. Regards sur la santé http://faceaface.revues.org/
Call for papers
Volume n° 12
Does Global Health Exist?
Health, Science and Politics in the Global South
The second decade of the third millennium puts politics and international programs in a paradoxical historical situation. When the Millennium Development Goals were launched at the Summit of the same name, in the headquarters of the United Nations in New York in September 2000, it was both the beginning of an unprecedented eagerness and an international synergy revealing a new “global”
perspective. The launch of this international political operation relied on coherence and collaboration between stakeholders from the UN, the state and the private sector. It involved setting priorities which would go beyond slogans, the most mocked and obsolete of these being “health for all by the year 2000”. Three of the Millennium Development Goals are directly related to health: reduce infant mortality, improve maternal health and combat HIV/Aids, malaria and other diseases. At that time, the secretary general, Kofi Annan was supposed to embrace the scared union and take up the gauntlet of international political will. Our purpose is not to yield to easy criticism of the unreached objectives but to offer a dynamic and scientific point of view on the years 2000-2010. At the same time as being full of disappointments, this decade also witnessed major changes and headway in therapeutic innovations as well as reversing some economical paradigms which opened up or in some cases speeded up access to care (for Aids and Malaria) for a significant proportion of people in the Global South. The international financial crisis which befell the world in 2008 brought with it the risk of grant reductions from donor countries and consequently the idea of a collective danger for the South.
The 12th issue of the international electronic journal, “Face A Face. Regards sur la Santé” will be devoted to the economical, political, social and therapeutic dynamics which characterize the health world and which is at a crossroads between hope and financial crisis.
We are soliciting papers which would emphasize the present ambivalent situation through a sector by sector analysis of targeted policies on an illness (malaria, Aids, Tuberculosis) or on a specific issue (i.e. women’s, children’s or sexual minorities’ health).
The progress made and the innovative responses in many areas do not compensate for the difficulties which accompanied them (implementation, economic barriers, and political leadership). The purpose of this issue is to document the different ways of combining scientific research and the hazards of implementing it in particular geographical, social or political settings.
The 2000 decade also saw an achievement which remains unequaled in the field of public health, a gathering of stakeholders alongside traditional WHO or state interlocutors. These new stakeholders and institutions describe multi-faceted political, economical and health perspectives. They promote multilateral ambitions and public-private partnerships (such as the Global Fund or the GAVI Alliance) - Global Alliance for vaccines and immunization or bilateral (PEPFAR- the American Aids program) and also show a decisive moment for private foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
This plurality of power centers in health related matters forms a theme which studies could take up in order to show an operating logic, and a power logic, emphasizing what is at stake, the contradictions, the resources and the limits. The weight of these networks and the diversity of the responses that these stakeholders bring to health related questions especially for countries in the Global South seem to deconstruct or engage the acuteness of a new Global Health brand.
This commonly-used “brand name” represents both a rich perspective of a willingness to coordinate international efforts and probably constitutes the most contradictory definition in relation to health inequalities in a globalized world.
Contributions can come from any social science discipline and from any country. They must be written in French and are limited to 30,000 characters.
Schedule: an abstract of 200 words maximum followed by the key words and names and addresses of the authors is due on the 10th of December 2011 at the latest.
The reading committee will select the contributions and the authors of the selected articles will have to send their contribution by the 30th of January 2012.
The abstracts and articles of this 12th issue must be sent by email to the following address:
faceaface@revues.org
