On the coloniality of global public health

Abstract

The continued inordinate demise from communicable pathogens in the global South is not the result of an intractable problem thwarting our best efforts to prevent and cure disease; we have the means. Rather, as an accomplice to contemporary imperialism, public health manages (as a profession) and maintains (as an academic discipline) global health inequity. It does this through ‘bourgeois empiricist’ models of disease causation, which serve protected affluence by uncritically reifying inequitable social relations in the modern/colonial matrix of power and making them appear commonsensical.