Mobilizing for Health Justice: Global Health Watch 7
Since its first edition in 2005, Global Health Watch (GHW) – the flagship publication of the People’s Health Movement (PHM) – has been critically reporting on the state of the world’s health. Published every three or four years, it comments on developments in global health while focusing on continuities with past popular struggles.
As with previous editions, GHW7 comes to life with contributions from over one hundred activists around the world, sharing experiences and analysis on issues affecting people’s health in the contexts they live in and efforts to progress towards greater health justice. This process was energized by the fifth People’s Health Assembly (PHA5), the global gathering of PHM, that took place in Argentina in April 2024 under the motto “Making ‘Health for All’ our struggle for ‘Buen Vivir”.
Political contributions from Latin America are manifest in the first GHW7 section, dedicated to “The global political and economic architecture”, where an up-to-date analysis of current health crises is followed by contributions that frame them in an eco-feminist perspective, showing how alternatives can be rooted in ancestral wisdoms and the practice of ‘Buen Vivir’. The second section addresses old and new challenges for public and global health systems through the critical lenses of gender justice and decoloniality. The third section, “Beyond Healthcare,” addresses key social and environmental determinants of health, while the “Watching” section critically apprises the state of global governance for health with a focus on several key institutions. The final section, “Resistance, struggles and alternatives,” highlights areas of transformative change by health activists in a global context of increasing repression. The book ends with a chapter on PHA5, highlighting how collective action is the most powerful medicine against ill health and health inequality at the human and planetary levels.
On World Health Day, 2025, PHM launches the introductory chapter of the 7th edition of the Global Health Watch: From a Political Economy of Disease to a Political Economy for Wellbeing
Global Health Watch 7 will include the following chapters
A1. From a Political Economy of Disease to a Political Economy for Wellbeing
A2. Advancing an Eco-Feminist Political Economy for Health
A3. Ancestral and Popular Knowledge for Buen Vivir
B1. Privatization and Financialization of Health Systems: Challenges and Public Alternatives
B2. Artificial Intelligence, Digital Technologies, and Health
B3. Building Equitable Health Systems: A Transformative Proposal from an Intersectional Gender Perspective
B4. Abolition Medicine as a Tool for Health Justice
B5. Decolonizing Global Health
C1. War, Conflict and Displacement
C2. People on the Move
C3. Putting the Right to Health to Work
C4. Tax Justice: A Pathway to Better Health
C5. Commercial/Corporate Determination of Health
D1. WHO’s Compromised Role in Global Health Leadership
D2. Unpacking Our Pandemic Failures for Future Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness, and Response
D3. Financing Pandemic Recovery, Prevention, Preparedness and Response
E1. National Struggles for the Right to Health
E2. Taking Extractives to Court
E3. Fear and Hope in ‘Speaking Truth to Power’: Struggles for Health in Times of Repression and Shrinking Spaces
E4. 5th People’s Health Assembly: Advancing in the Struggle for Liberation and Against Capitalism
People’s Health Movement and the GHW7 co-producing organizations: ALAMES, Equinet, Health Poverty Action, Medact, Medico International, Sama, Third World Network, Viva Salud; Editorial committee members: Ron Labonte (Canada; PHM, coeditor of GHW7), Chiara Bodini (Italy; PHM, coeditor of GHW7), Rene Loewenson (Zimbabwe; TARSC, Equinet), Dave McCoy (Malaysia; UN university international institute for global health), Dian Blandina (Indonesia; PHM global health governance group), Devaki Nambiar (India; George institute for global health and PHM India), Matheus Falcao (Brazil; Brazilian Centre for Health Studies – Cebes and PHM Brazil), Lauren Paremoer (South Africa; PHM global health governance group), Penelope Milsom (UK; Medact), Ravi Ram (PHM Kenya), Hani Serag (PHM, Co-chair of Global Steering Council).
The 7th edition of the GHW will be published with Daraja Press, a not-for-profit publisher, based in Québec, Canada, that seeks to reclaim the past, contest the present and invent the future. Daraja is the KiSwahili word for ‘bridge’. As its name suggests, Daraja Press seeks to build bridges, especially bridges of solidarity between and amongst movements, intellectuals and those engaged in struggles for a just world.