Description
There have been decades of public health scholarship and rhetoric opposing the use of borders to attempt to control infectious disease outbreaks. Such measures, it has been shown, are ineffective, risk discriminatory and rights-breaching policies and practices, and distract attention (and divert resources) from the types of public health intervention that might actually deliver work. Despite this, during the COVID pandemic the vast majority of the world’s governments did implement border restrictions of one type or another. Perhaps even more notably, many in public health called for such measures to be made more stringent.
The argument of this paper is that, in the aftermath of COVID, we are seeing the emergence of a ‘health security industrial complex’ which, amongst other things, is normalising, and building the infrastructure for, continued disease-related bordering. The private sector plays a wide range of key roles in the design and implementation of this health security borderwork, not least through the installation of new technological infrastructure at points of entry. This, it is argued here, complicates our intuitive understanding of how bordering decisions are made. And whilst these developments have often been spurred by the experience of health emergencies, they may well lead to path dependencies that increase the likelihood of health security bordering in normal times. Drawing on a range of case studies of different elements of health bordering, this paper will examine both the evidence for the emergence of an industrial complex, and why we should be worried about it.
