Building reparative futures demands a reckoning with the crisis form of global health
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19591983 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sharifah Sekalala (0000-0002-5434-5245, University of Warwick), Shajoe Lake (0009-0002-5442-0329, University of Warwick, corresponding author) |
| Editors | Eugene T Richardson (0000-0001-8437-0671) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | e0006473 |
| Publication date | 2026-05-20 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | PLOS Global Public Health (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2767-3375 • E-ISSN: 2767-3375 |
| Publisher | Public Library of Science (PLoS) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1371/journal.pgph.0006473 |
| PMID | 42160365 |
| OpenAlex | W7161783155 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 41 |
Recent cuts to global health funding and US withdrawal from the World Health Organization have generated claims that global health has entered a new crisis. This essay argues that such accounts misread the present moment. The better view is that global health operates through a ‘crisis form’, a modality of governance in which structural inequality is treated as ordinary, acute disruptions (Big Events) are framed as emergencies, and responses to Big Events restore institutional authority without transforming the historically continuous racialized political economy in which global health is embedded. Drawing on past Big Events we trace this pattern from colonial medicine, through Alma Ata, HIV/AIDS, Ebola to COVID-19, showing how each Big Event exposed the underlying structural problems in global health and generated promises of change while preserving structural inequality. We then analyze early 2025 commentaries on aid cuts and US withdrawal from the World Health Organization to show how crisis discourse, even at a moment ripe with decolonial talk, channels political energy into the language of rescue and renewal, leaving deeper systemic questions of redress and redistribution untouched. In response, the essay develops reparatory global health as a political and conceptual orientation that calls for a refusal of restoration by taking the structural problems exposed by Big Events as the object of action, and by treating reparations as transformative, tactical, and oriented towards structural change and non-recurrence
Civil society · Corporate governance · Futures contract · Global governance · Global health · Politics · Redistribution (election) · Redress · Global Health and Surgery · Global Security and Public Health · Viral Infections and Outbreaks Research
Covid-19: Make it the Last Pandemic
Body and Soul
From Modern Planetary Health to Decolonial Promotion of One Health of Peripheries
Decolonising Global (Public) Health
A plan for black American reparations
Reparations for Caribbean slavery and the potential impact on human well-being
Climate reparations for threats to health
Reparations and distributive justice in global health
From harm to healing
Structural adjustment
Addressing Vaccine Inequity During the Covid-19 Pandemic
Reconsidering Reparations
Global health and the elite capture of decolonization
Health inequities
Anthropocentric framings of One Health
Vaccinating capitalism
No Justice, No Health
From International Sanitary Conventions to Global Health Security
The Global Menace
The Origins of Primary Health Care and Selective Primary Health Care
Beyond Berets
Working With the Panthers to Transform Health Care for Poor Black Communities
The Unification of the Globe by Disease? The International Sanitary Conferences on Cholera, 1851–1894
From Imperialism to the “Golden Age” to the Great Lockdown
The futility of the pandemic treaty
Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom
| Highly cited | No |
|---|