The capacity to conduct international disease outbreak surveillance and share information about outbreaks quickly has empowered both State and Non-State Actors to take an active role in stopping the spread of disease by generating new technical means to identify potential pandemics through the creation of shared reporting platforms. Despite all the rhetoric about the importance of infectious disease surveillance, the concept itself has received relatively little critical attention from academics, practitioners, and policymakers. This book asks leading contributors in the field to engage with five key issues attached to international disease outbreak surveillance - transparency, local engagement, practical needs, integration, and appeal - to illuminate the political effect of these technologies on those who use surveillance, those who respond to surveillance, and those being monitored.

Through an in-depth examination of the interactions between the South African government and the international AIDS control regime, Jeremy Youde examines not only the emergence of an epistemic community but also the development of a counter-epistemic community offering fundamentally different understandings of AIDS and radically different policy prescriptions. In addition, individuals have become influential in the crafting of the South African government's AIDS policies, despite universal condemnation from the international scientific community. This study highlights the relevance and importance of Africa to international affairs. The actions of African states call into question many of our basic assumptions and challenge us to refine our analytical framework. It is ideally suited to scholars interested in African studies, international organizations, global governance and infectious diseases.

In the 1980s, health was a marginal issue on the international political agenda, and it barely figured into donor states' foreign aid allocation. Within a generation, health had developed a robust set of governance structures that drive significant global political action, incorporate a wide range of actors, and receive increasing levels of funding. What explains this dramatic change over such a short period of time? Drawing on the English School of international relations theory, this book argues that global health has emerged as a secondary institution within international society. Rather than being a side issue, global health now occupies an important role. Addressing global health issues-financially, organizationally, and politically-is part of how actors demonstrate their willingness and ability to help realize their moral responsibility and obligation to others. In this way, it demonstrates how global health governance has emerged, grown, and persisted-even in the face of global economic challenges and inadequate responses to particular health crises. The book also shows how English School conceptions of international society would benefit from expanding their analytical gaze to address international economic issues and incorporate non-state actors. The book begins by building a case for using the English School to understand the role of global health governance before looking at global health governance's place in international society through case studies about the growth of development assistance for health, the international response to the Ebola outbreak, and China's role within the global health governance framework. .