TY - JOUR T1 - Global health is dead; long live global health! Critiques of the field and its future JF - BMJ Global Health JO - BMJ Global Health DO - 10.1136/bmjgh-2021-006648 VL - 6 IS - 7 SP - e006648 AU - Martha Lincoln Y1 - 2021/07/01 UR - http://gh.bmj.com/content/6/7/e006648.abstract N2 - Suppose we accept the intriguing premise that ‘health is politics by other means’, as the sociologist Alondra Nelson has argued. What does this mean for global health?We might first extrapolate along familiar lines: global health outcomes are conditioned by the dynamics of international realpolitik—trade, foreign policy, and armed conflict—and as such, the task of global health professionals is to study and mitigate these impacts. But less comfortably, Nelson’s provocative axiom suggests that the field of global health itself is a site of political manoeuvring, interinstitutional struggles, ideological agendas and attempted elite capture. In this increasingly widely shared view, the mechanisms for delivering medical services and resources to the Global South are part of a global apparatus of political and economic domination and not a hedge against it.Global health professionals thus inhabit a contradiction. Though it is incumbent on the field to articulate aspirational agendas, the project of global health has also represented a venue for some of the world’s most powerful political and economic institutions to advance their interests. Hence, the discipline has found itself on uncertain footing in recent years, struggling with both its history and its future. At the present moment, perhaps no one is better positioned to call attention to these contradictions than critically minded practitioners active within the organisations that plan global health programmes and deliver their services.Four recently published volumes illustrate the importance of critiques articulated within and against global health. The authors—each of whom is trained as an anthropologist as well as a global health practitioner—base their assessments on case studies in the Global South: respectively, the scale-up of HIV/AIDS treatment in efforts to end the global epidemic, with a focus on the Caribbean nation of Grenada1; the privatisation of medical services in Tajikistan, a republic of the … ER -