At a crossroads

The contemporary modern age is marked less by relations that take place within national borders and far more by those that transcend these frontiers. ¹ Not only are more people crossing these borders than ever before, but ‘things’—like ideas, technologies, behaviours—are moving through virtual and real spaces, reconfiguring the ‘edges’ of temporal and spatial boundaries. It is perhaps, then, no coincidence that this global recognition of our increasingly interconnected world has run alongside an escalation in international efforts to contain—through development initiatives and public health programmes, for example—the spread of epidemic diseases. ² This interconnection has, according to John Agnew, ³ resulted in the phenomenon of ‘time–space compression’, ⁴ and it has fostered the emergence of what Castells describes as the ‘network society’; ⁵ together, these phenomena point to the extent to which the local is tied into the global. Put differently, the global movement of pathogens has foregrounded the extent to which individual lives are intricately connected, from the molecular to the global. Further, as discussed in this chapter, not only are individual lives connected through their shared vulnerability to disease, but this vulnerability is unevenly distributed, as some individuals are less able to access vital health care than others.