Description
Disease surveillance has become the constant, indisputable dictum for global health. Data are seductive because they promise to bring order to complexity. COVID-19, for example, has been made visible through data; it is perceived through the numbers that dominate public discourse. Private actors and public initiatives have sprung up to support global efforts at harmonising data. The paper argues that states which cannot solely generate data, and thus produce their own knowledge, are less able to command governmental reason. They are subjected to regimes of knowledge and truth controlled by other actors, who manage the apparatuses of data production and the access to them. The resultant geopolitics of knowledge reproduce a global divide between knowing subjects and the populations who are subordinated to that knowledge/power as its objects. In practice, this division legitimises hierarchy in the international order through the distinction between actors who produce data/knowledge and those who lack the international capacity to do so. By using covid-19 and antimicrobial resistance as case studies, this paper demonstrates that current disease surveillance reproduces the logic of ‘quasi-sovereignty’ used by colonial lawyers to command formal equality and hierarchy between imperial sub-polities.
