Discipline of Sociology & Criminology Seminar Series

Governing (Future) Health: Biopolitics and the Global Tobacco Epidemic

Speaker: Dr Katherine Kenny (University of Sydney)

Join via Zoom: Email Leah Williams Veazey for link and more information – Leah Williams Veazey leah.williamsveazey@sydney.edu.au

In this talk, I trace the development of the world’s first, and still only, legally binding health treaty: the World Health Organisation’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Unanimously endorsed in the World Health Assembly, then brought into force in 2005, the WHO FCTC has become one of the most widely and rapidly adopted treaties in the history of the United Nations. The success of the treaty is frequently attributed to its “unequivocal evidence base” and is often seen, primarily, as a legal/technical accomplishment. However, the evidence base of global tobacco control was built on a very particular way of quantifying the global burden of disease that was introduced by the World Bank in 1993. By ascribing economic value to the individual years of life lost to ill-health, this way of imagining the health of the global population facilitated analyses of the current and future costs and benefits of potential health interventions, embedding the logic of speculative forecasting in global health priority-setting.

Viewed through this speculative lens, an impending global tobacco epidemic came to be identified as an object of global health concern, and eventually, of regulatory intervention. In this talk, I argue that far more than a technical accomplishment, the development and eventual passage of the WHO FCTC represents a key moment in the institutionalisation of a particular way of knowing and valuing health, one in which health is recast as a form of human capital, and which embeds a logic of return-on-investment at the heart of global health.  This has consequences not only for how health is known and valued, but also for how it is governed.

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