Vital Systems Security

A recent series of NY Times articles has tracked novel risks emerging from the global food and drug supply chain. China, as has been mentioned before, seems to be the key source of threat. The major issue is that given the complexities of the supply chain (and the practice of erasing the original suppliers in order to protect the middleman) there is no way of tracking where ingredients come from – such as glycerin in toothpaste – and so if it turns out that there are dangerous counterfeit supplies, it is impossible to locate and punish the offending supplier. From the vantage of VSS, what is significant is both the sense that a global food and drug supply system generates novel risks, and the emerging demand to regulate this “global pipeline” of pharmaceutical and food ingredients. Developing a reliable tracking system will be a crucial step. There are similarities here to the solution proposed by Stephen Flynn to the problem of the uncertain origin of shipping containers – or to current European efforts to track the origins of GM foods, as described in this article by Javier Lezaun.

Here is an interesting critique of the work of NGO’s in the field of global health: The Challenge of Global Health

Apparently, there are now more than 60,000 AIDS-related NGOs alone. The piece, published in Foreign Affairs, also includes an exchange between journalist Laurie Garrett and medical anthropologist Paul Farmer.

What does it mean to move ‘global warming’ into the domain of security? – Here is an article in today’s New York Times.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an excellent article in today’s New York Times on the drugs that are in your water.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here is an interesting research Project: Transformations in Global Public Health Surveillance. Read the rest of this entry »

Indonesia has agreed to send samples of avian influenza viral strains to the WHO as soon as it has access to affordable vaccines. It will be interesting to see to what kind of benefit-sharing model this will lead. Anthropologists in Indonesia, please inquire!

Read the rest of this entry »

In this February’s Harper’s, Edward N. Luttwak of the Center for Strategic and International Studies heartily condemns the newly published Counterinsurgency Manual. Read the rest of this entry »

Have been reading Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map . It is a popular history of John Snow’s effort to prove the waterborn theory of cholera by mapping the spatial trajectory of an 1854 outbreak in relation to a specific water pump in London. The story is fascinating in multiple ways, but one thing to note from our vantage is the way that “population security” was initially articulated in relation to urgent problems of collective life. Snow’s knowledge is archival, and it is integrally related to the development of urban infrastructures: water and sewer systems for London’s burgeoning population. The mapping process – once it had finally convinced skeptics to abandon miasma theories of contagion – led to an understanding of the need to keep human waste away from water supplies, and to the construction of the first modern sewer system, a daunting engineering challenge. It would be interesting to compare the British cholera story to the French one told in French Modern, especially in relation to the question of “the social” as an object of knowledge and intervention.

.

From Andy’s trip to Europe, another promising set of connections in the Biopolitics of Security Network based out of Lancaster University. Comrades both conceptually (Foucault’s population security is one key point of reference) and in terms of the network form. Also some similar attempts to draw connections between the biosciences, biopolitics, and new assemblages of security. To add to our list of fellow travellers.