Browsing by Subject "Biopower"

Following the development of effective vaccines against COVID-19, a global access gap has emerged, with wealthier countries receiving the vast majority of vaccines and therapeutics. The governments of several lower-income countries have since identified a major cause of this gap to be intellectual property arrangements governing the development of pharmaceutical products. In response, these countries submitted a proposal within the World Trade Organization’s TRIPS Council to waive specific elements of the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights in relation to COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics. Since then, a small number of wealthy countries where most major vaccine producers are located have resisted calls to pass the Waiver, thus maintaining intellectual property restrictions and limiting access to vaccines. This thesis explores the discursive nature of the arguments put forward against the Waiver within the institutional context of the WTO TRIPS Council from October 2020 to December 2021. It applies the Critical Discourse Analysis approach to identify several discourses that characterise the nature of opposition to the TRIPS Waiver, to explain how these shape political outcomes and delimit courses of effective action and resistance. These discourses are interpreted through the theoretical lens of Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, which posits that sovereign power is increasingly based on the ability to decide who is worthy of life and who can be subjected to death, with racism and neoliberal market logics being the twin technologies of necropolitical violence. The thesis relies on primary material sourced from hundreds of pages of meeting minutes from the TRIPS Council, where opponents to the Waiver lay out their arguments and discursively construct their opposition in ways that are consistent with the necropolitical reading of global politics and structural violence. This thesis analyses this primary material in conjunction with secondary material from the pharmaceutical industry, uncovering discursive parallels that unveil the neoliberal logics that fuel opposition to the TRIPS Waiver. This thesis concludes that opposition to the TRIPS Waiver is both a driver and a symptom of a planetary renewal of colonial relations, in which neoliberal discourses around health have served to keep lifesaving treatments out of reach to those who cannot afford them during a deadly pandemic. The implications of necropolitical discourses around healthcare access for both democracy and for the future of the pandemic are fatal.