Description
This paper examines how vaccine diplomacy has been used by revisionist states, principally Russia and China, to advance alternative visions of international order. During the COVID-19 pandemic, scholarship analysed vaccine diplomacy as a pandemic-specific phenomenon, with limited contextualisation in the longer history of medical diplomacy. How did the Soviet Union and China use medical diplomacies to advance their geopolitical interests during the Cold War? How did these earlier experiences shape their approach to COVID-19 vaccines? This paper focuses on two case studies: the Chinese Medical Teams (CMTs) in Africa and the Soviet export of the polio vaccine. It argues that both states developed medical diplomacy as part of foreign policy to narrate global hierarchy, signal normative superiority, and cultivate geopolitical alignments. These strategies were shaped by the medical instruments deployed and the exporting state’s vision of world order. Drawing on Historical International Relations, the paper shows how medical tools were strategically selected and narrativised. Re-situating COVID-19 vaccine diplomacy within this lineage reveals continuities, challenging the assumption that pandemic-era vaccine diplomacy was unprecedented. Instead, COVID-era vaccine competition reiterates established revisionist soft-power practices within global health governance.
