Speaker: Dr Madalitso Zililo Phiri

Venue: JIAS and Zoom

Discussant: Prof Tendayi Sithole

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The Covid-19 pandemic reified pre-existing inequalities predicated on anti-black racism, imperial geographical imaginations and the violent language of biomilitarism. One lesson learnt during the Covid-19 pandemic is that organizing global biopolitics around the values of Euro-American colonial modernity is dead and defunct. Those who genuinely care for the future of a world society should rather ask the right questions that are planetary in scope that will culminate toward the realization of a post-imperial world and new biopolitics. In this reflective essay I achieve this task by deploying the tools of historical sociology to underscore the importance of race, racism, racialization and global responses to pandemics. How can we develop ideas and concepts for the imagination of a post-imperial global health regime I ask? Second, can alternative futures be imagined if the monopolistic control of power, global scientific processes and knowledge regime is framed around a problematic lexicography of a Eurocentric totalising project of being human? Lastly, if there is a scientific consensus that we need alternative futures, what kinds of knowledge(s) is needed to bring about a post-imperial liberated order? The future of global health regime is a decolonial one predicated on a new biopolitics. I provide four paradigmatic approaches to subvert imperial global health: (i) abandonment of a Eurocentric conceptualization of racial hierarchy and modernity (ii) pivoting ecocide in global health regime (iii) disbanding the commodification of public health (iii) (iv) organizing a new world order through health reparations.