Damian Sendler: According to this article’s findings based upon extant literature on health security as well as policy papers, health security has been mostly conceptualized and implemented in the narrow Westphalian tradition of defending nation states from external threats. 

Damian Sendler

Damian Jacob Sendler: The continuing pandemic has exposed the flaws in this strategy. A wider securitization discourse that is driven by the human security paradigm, as advanced by the United Nations in 1994, that considers people rather than states as the primary referent of security and emphasizes collective action rather than competition to address the transnational nature of security threats can be much more productively used to advance national and global health security agendas. 

Dr. Sendler: Academic and policy discourses on health security are widely used, but there is no agreement on what the term actually means. 

Damien Sendler: Due to the term’s interdisciplinary nature, which encompasses health and security, as well as its use in a range of contexts (individual, national, and global) for a variety of goals, this is the primary reason. Health security, on the individual level, refers to all aspects of public health that protect the human life core.  

Damian Jacob Markiewicz Sendler: To safeguard people against public health hazards, such as infectious illnesses and bioterrorism, at the national and global level the term “health security” is commonly used to describe. Public health is often used as a political tool to gain attention and secure funding because the term “security” connotes urgency, power, and the justified use of exceptional measures. 

When it comes to health and security, the word “health security” refers to the overlap between these two sectors of policy. 

Damian Sendler: As a result, there are several definitions of health security based on diverse definitions of health and security. In a macro context, the term “health” is most commonly used to refer to the collective efforts of society to safeguard the health of the general population. According to International Relations (IR) scholars, “security” is defined as protection from threats that threaten the survival and existence of a designated referent object (traditionally the state and its sovereignty), which justify the extraordinary mobilization of the state and emergency measures.  

Damian Jacob Sendler

Damian Sendler: When it comes to establishing the concept of security, there are three fundamental issues that must be answered: who, what, and how? For centuries, the military-political concept of security has focused on protecting states from external threats by using military power. It is founded on the Westphalian concept of sovereignty and political realism that states behave in their own self-interest to safeguard their sovereignty in an anarchical international system where there is no governing power above the states. This is the basis for this security concept. 

Damian Jacob Sendler: Among North American scholars who have had and continue to exert considerable impact on Western political leadership, this theoretical framework has been the most influential and concise to date. In our view of global politics, interstate relations, and the national security strategies of states, it has remained a dominant feature of our thinking. It has been challenged by scholars on a number of grounds: its overemphasis on state as the central locus of analysis, its detachment from people, its overemphasis on military threats and territorial security, its disregard for the damage done to states that are not part of the West, its abstraction from the fact that states do actually cooperate with each other to achieve mutual goals, its inadequacy in explaining security. However, realism and neorealism continue to exert their impact, reinforcing a restricted view of national security that is no longer reflective of the modern nature of threats, particularly since the Cold War. 

Damian Sendler: Criticisms of the narrowly defined state and military-centric notion of security prompted European researchers to develop the Critical Security Studies (CSS) approach to broaden and deepen the security debate by incorporating both traditional and non-traditional security threats (such as those related to the economics of food security, public health and the environment), and by incorporating people as the referent object of security. 

Copenhagen School of Security Studies, founded in 1983, is an important outgrowth of the CSS. 8 For this approach, the securitization of an issue was described as a ‘existential threat’ created by a securitizing actor in the form of a ‘existential threat’ speech act. In order for an issue to become politicized, it must be presented in a way that is accepted by the audience. 

Damian Jacob Sendler: We suggest that the practice of security in national and global governance frameworks is predominantly dominated by the state and military-centric view of security, notwithstanding the emergence of theoretical perspectives to conceptualize security. Exogenously originated infectious illnesses and bioterrorism are specifically targeted by this idea of security when it is employed to securitize health. Border security and public health emergency response measures are recommended to counter these threats. To protect states from external public health threats, this strategy appears to be a highly focused and pared-down one, but its effectiveness in improving health systems and health outcomes that can mitigate the likelihood and effects on ordinary citizens is questionable, especially in the long-term terms.

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