From Internationalism to Nationalism
Name
CSSAME Special Issue - Dwai Contribution - PrePrint.pdf
Size
1.45 MB
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Unknown
Checksum (MD5)
2fd72a175efd9585496ab278a35ebf4a
Author(s)
Banerjee, Dwaipayan
Date Issued
December 2021
Journal
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
Publisher
Duke University Press
Citation
Banerjee, Dwaipayan. 2021. "From Internationalism to Nationalism." Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 41 (3).
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
The steady rollout of Covid-19 vaccines comes attached with a series of difficult questions. Are vaccines a human right? Should patents be enforced in a way that puts people in the global South behind in a global queue? These questions are not new; the world struggled with these ethical dilemmas during the HIV-AIDS pandemic at the end of the twentieth century, when global South governments led by Nelson Mandela fought multinational pharmaceutical corporations for the right to essential life-saving drugs. Can the same strategies be mobilized to deal with inequalities in the distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine? This article demonstrates a technological and geopolitical shift in the last two decades that hinder global South solidarities actualized during the HIV-AIDS pandemic. Instead, Banerjee argues that in the present, multinational corporations and Euro-American governments are trying to reverse some of the key political visions and victories of HIV-AIDS internationalism, exploiting the urgency of the Covid-19 crisis to put in place a new vaccine apartheid.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Science, Technology and Society
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-9407806
