High Politics, Low Politics, and Global Health

It has become commonplace to argue that global health has ascended from "low politics" to the ranks of "high politics" in international relations�those issues of existential importance to the state and which concern its very survival. Despite its ubiquity, the actual substance of such a shift in the framing of global health is largely unexamined. In this article, I argue that empirical evidence belies the idea that global health is a "high politics" issue. This dichotomy makes little sense, and efforts to reframe global health as a "high politics" or securitized issue rarely succeed. While it is undoubtedly true that global health has received significantly greater attention from the international community over the past twenty-five to thirty years, that attention does not spring from global health being reframed as a "high politics" issue for states.