What can IR learn from disability studies? Debility, capacity and power in the case of Covid-19
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8244154 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jenn Hobbs (0000-0001-9877-4925, University of Leicester, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Publication date | 2025-12-31 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | European Journal of International Relations (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1354-0661 • E-ISSN: 1460-3713 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/13540661251401764 |
| OpenAlex | W7117690480 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 67 |
This paper argues that disability studies provides the tools for International Relations (IR) to better understand power in relation to global health. The paper offers two main theoretical claims to demonstrate this. First, the paper shows that disability studies makes visible the disableist and colonial power relations that underlie dominant conceptualisations of health. Second, the paper demonstrates that disability studies helps us to understand health not as a product of social relationships, but as a mode of governance. The paper argues that health is used to structure hierarchical relationships between bodies, revealing that health interventions are tied up in biopolitical racialised and (dis)ableist expressions of state power. To illustrate these arguments, the paper conducts an analysis of UK government policy in response to COVID-19. Applying insights from disability studies to the case study of COVID policy reveals the ways in which the debilitation of minority ethnic and disabled communities in order to capacitate others was not an unforeseen policy consequence, but a result of lockdown policy working as intended. Disability studies, then, can help show IR how power operates and circulates through relationships of health
Disability studies · Ethnic group · Government (linguistics · Order (exchange · Power (physics · Product (mathematics · Psychological intervention · Relation (database · State (computer science · Disability Rights and Representation · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Global Security and Public Health
Disability-inclusive Covid-19 response
How should we define health?
A Holistic Model for Wellness and Prevention Over the Life Span
Comparison of Deaths Rates for Covid-19 across Europe During the First Wave of the Covid-19 Pandemic
Epidemic Illusions
Feminist Global Health Security
Feminist, Queer, Crip
The New Politics of Disablement
Power in global governance
Precarious Lives
Health Risks and Consequences of a Covid-19 Infection for People with Disabilities
Queer/Fear
Becoming Vulnerable
Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory
The involuntary sterilisation of marginalised women
Making space for disability studies within a structurally competent medical curriculum
Intersex human rights
Race and the spatialisation of risk during the 2013–2016 West African Ebola epidemic
The anti‐social model of disability
The Global Politics of Medicine
Ebola, gender and conspicuously invisible women in global health governance
Frames, Paradigms and Power
Should HIV/Aids Be Securitized? The Ethical Dilemmas of Linking HIV/Aids and Security
The Politics of Exceptionalism
The Social Model of Disability and the Disappearing Body
Security, Disease, Commerce
Decolonising disability
The Right to Maim
Body Politic, Bodies Impolitic
Domopolitics and Disease
Aids, Security, Biopolitics
The New Geopolitics of Disease
Open Space Slow Life and Ecologies of Sensation
Reinscribing global hierarchies
Postcolonialreproductions
Let them be young and stoutly set in limbs
Exploring the critiques of the social model of disability
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |