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.