Geopolitical health: A new imperative for understanding the health of the people we serve

Abstract
Public health should step up to the issues of the planet in our back yard, according to Evelyne de Leeuw in the Journal of Global and Public and One Health earlier this year. We agree: the public health community has been slow to pick issues of geopolitics which have been preventing and worsening the health of the public for many years. Neoliberalism has been the central economic policy, particularly for the western post-industrial world, and much of the Global South, responsible for many of the harms to the health of people and planet that we face today. There is a ‘golden thread’ from neoliberalism to oligarchy, to populism, to culture wars, to performative cruelty, to autocracy, to a new age of conquest and global instability. All these geopolitical forces are impacting on health. They are damaging efforts to achieve equity in health, and tackle climate breakdown, and do more to prevent non-communicable disease epidemics, and be prepared and resilient against major disasters and new pandemics. The public health community must step up, if it is to be effective in its work to protect and improve the health of people and planet. And we need to work with an informed and empowered public to achieve that.

Keywords: Public health; global health; Geopolitics; neoliberalism; inequalities in health; oligarchy; super-rich; populism; performative cruelty; culture wars; Trump 2.0 presidency; commercial determinants of health; climate change; reproductive health