The politics of epidemics: From the local to the global

It is impossible to write about these two epidemics without reflecting on their direct impact on our lives. At the same time, they produced significant social, cultural and political shifts, which are often ignored in the emphasis in treating them as health emergencies. In the early 2000s, there was some interest in understanding HIV through the lens of human security, and there is an even greater urgency to bring that analysis to bear on COVID-19, which underlines the importance of expanding conventional notions of national security to include issues such as climate change and epidemic disease.