A second strand of my research concerns the relatively novel arena of “global health security.” This work began as an NSF-STS funded collaborative project (with anthropologists Stephen J. Collier and Paul Rabinow) to map the emerging field of “biosecurity,” using the techniques of multi-sited ethnography. The initial context of the project was intensive governmental concern, in the wake of the attacks of 9/11 and the anthrax letters that followed, with the potential security risks posed by the new life sciences. Our research project asked how authorities in public health, national security and the life sciences sought to assess and mitigate the perceived threat of a catastrophic disease outbreak, whether “naturally occurring” or man-made. How, in other words, did experts in these fields work to transform uncertain danger into manageable risk? This investigation resulted in the publication of several articles, both single and co-authored, as well as a collected volume (co-edited with Collier), entitled Biosecurity Interventions: Global Health and Security in Question (SSRC/ Columbia University Press, 2008).
I have continued this line of research into biopolitics and security with two sustained empirical projects. The first is a single-authored book, initially supported by a fellowship from the International Center for Advanced Studies at NYU, entitled Global Health in a Time of Emergency (University of California Press, 2017). The book focuses on the practices through which public health authorities envision and intervene in potential disease emergencies at a global scale. It begins by tracing the process through which a group of life scientists and public health experts constituted “emerging infectious disease”—an expansive category that includes weaponized smallpox, drug resistant tuberculosis, avian influenza and Ebola—as a national security and global health threat, beginning in the late 1980s. The book then analyzes a series of recent cases in which health authorities’ attempts to mitigate the risk of novel pathogenic outbreaks has provoked political controversy. These cases include the debate over “viral sovereignty” sparked by the Indonesian Health Minister’s 2008 refusal to share avian influenza samples with the WHO’s Global Influenza Surveillance Network; European critics’ accusations of WHO corruption in the wake of the H1N1 outbreak of 2009; the recent struggle among life scientists and US biosecurity officials over how to regulate “gain of function” research in influenza virology; and the widespread criticism of the WHO over its response to the early stages of the Ebola epidemic in 2014.
A common thread running across these various controversies, the book demonstrates, is the theme of epistemic and political debate over the appropriate means to evaluate and manage the uncertain threat of emerging disease. Often, disagreements among biomedical researchers, security officials, public health authorities, and others occur when their underlying assumptions about the characteristics of the object at hand are incommensurable, in ways that may remain unclear to participants. In particular, I contrast two distinctive “styles of reasoning” about the threat posed by novel pathogens: the first, characteristic of classical public health, is based on the statistical calculation of risk using historical patterns of disease incidence; the second, which has been borrowed from the worlds of national security and emergency management, assumes that the likelihood of a given outbreaks is not calculable and that one must instead prepare for its eventuality. A second book-length project, this one co-authored with Stephen J. Collier, is entitled The Government of Catastrophe: A Genealogy of Vital Systems Security. Based on research funded by a collaborative research grant from the Science, Technology and Society Program of the National Science Foundation, the book traces the genealogy of contemporary techniques for the anticipation and management of emergency that are shared across a range of governmental domains, including pandemic preparedness, disaster management, and critical infrastructure protection. Drawing on archival research, government records and published documents, the book argues that a novel way of understanding and managing catastrophic risk consolidated in the early Cold War United States, and then extended its reach over the following decades. In particular, the book describes the emergence of techniques such as scenario-based exercises, catastrophe modeling, emergency resource management, stockpiling of essential supplies, and administrative preparedness. This project has yielded four co-authored publications, and we plan to submit a completed manuscript to Princeton University Press in the fall 2017.
