The World Health Organization and the political embroilment of wounded multilateralism

In the spring of 2020, the decision by the Trump administration to terminate its relationship with the WHO, in the midst of the more serious public health crisis in more than a century, shocked the international community. This controversial move shed a crude light on the global health watchdog’s intrinsic vulnerabilities. The present article strives to map the apparition, the development and the challenges faced by the global health governance paradigm embodied by the World Health Organization. The working hypothesis of our paper rests upon the idea that the field of public health has been central to the fashioning of the liberal world order: as a result, it is important to understand the WHO’ mandate goes beyond technocratic issues of disease prevention and containment. The organization is a spawn of a much wider liberal humanistic project, which now comes under intense fire. We will also strive to restore the diachronic dimension of the corrosive dynamics undercutting the global health governance infrastructure, from the North-South schism to the risk of public health “privatization” enacted though governmental disengagement and overreliance on private actors.