Description
Using insights from postcolonial and decolonial theory, this paper critically examines how enduring colonial logics shape practices of science diplomacy in global health governance. It argues that the enactment of science diplomacy is influenced by competing interests and uneven power dynamics, which limit its purported neutrality and universal benefit. The paper further explores how science diplomacy, positioned at the intersection of science, policy, and International Relations, can reproduce rather than redress colonial hierarchies through ongoing tenets of control, extraction, and loss.
Focusing on the Joint External Evaluations (JEEs) and National Action Plans for Health Security (NAPHS) as mechanisms of pandemic preparedness embedded in the International Health Regulations (IHRs), the project aims to understand how historical postcolonial asymmetries between former colonising and colonised states can persist within ostensibly cooperative frameworks. Drawing on the 2013–2016 Ebola epidemic as a case study, it analyses how interactions between the United States, the United Kingdom, Liberia, and Sierra Leone illustrate the often-unequal interplay of collaboration, authority, and expertise within contemporary science diplomacy.
Employing a mixed-method approach that integrates document analysis, semi-structured interviews, and network analysis, this research offers new critical insights into how the practice of science diplomacy, vis-à-vis the JEEs and NAPHS, can perpetuate colonial hierarchies of power through processes of collaboration, decision-making, and expertise. In doing so, it seeks to understand how lessons from past applications of the JEEs and NAPHS can inform future ones, thus to meet the global challenges of the next 50 years, the concept and practice of science diplomacy must continue to critically engage with its colonial inheritances. From this, there can be the cultivation of more pluralistic, reflexive, and equitable approaches to collaboration, knowledge production, and decision-making in science diplomacy.
