Soft war: Geopolitics and financing at the WHO (1945-2025)
Description
At this week’s World Health Assembly, geopolitics and financing will be at the forefront of many discussions and difficult decisions ahead. This has been precipitated by the withdrawal of the United States of America from the World Health Organization (WHO) and global health more generally, raising existential questions and triggering a crisis at the WHO. Yet all of this has happened before. Understanding how the Organization, health diplomacy, and the broader constituencies behind them have negotiated crisis and change since the WHO’s founding in 1945 illuminates the challenges facing global health today – and offers clarifying insight into the road ahead.
This event will bring together experts in the history of global health and its financing to shed light on how geopolitics and financing have been linked to WHO in the past, and to the history of global health in general.
Speakers
Opening & Closing Remarks: Vinh-Kim Nguyen | Co-Director, Global Health Centre, Professor, Anthropology and Sociology, Geneva Graduate Institute
- Ilona Kickbusch | Founder and Chair, International Advisory Board, Global Health Centre
- Joseph Kutzin | Senior Fellow, Results for Development
- Laurence Monnais | Professeur ordinaire, Histoire de la médecine et de la santé publique, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV), Université de Lausanne (UNIL), Institut des humanités en médecine (IHM)
- Keith Krause | Director, Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding, Professor, International Relations & Political Science, Geneva Graduate Institute; Chair Curt Gasteyger in International Security and Conflict Studies
Moderated by Daniela Morich | Senior Manager and Advisor, Global Health Centre, Geneva Graduate Institute