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Biosecurity as a boundary object: Science, society, and the state

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Abstract

Biosecurity is a concern in many parts of the world but is differently conceived and addressed depending on context. This article draws on two cases concerned with life sciences research involving dangerous pathogens, one in the United States and one in Israel, to examine this variability. In both cases, concern revolves around issues of biosafety and bioterrorism, which are targeted by similar policies and solutions. The cases, nevertheless, differ. In the United States, biosecurity is contextualized in the dynamics between science and society, and apprehension about research with dangerous pathogens focuses on the social risks and benefits of such research. In Israel, biosecurity is contextualized in the dynamics between science and the state and hinges on whether and how far the state should restrict scientific freedom. In view of this difference, the authors advocate the development of a nuanced concept of biosecurity capable of describing and explaining local permutations. They suggest reconceptualizing biosecurity as a boundary object that mediates between competing domains and that takes variable form in efforts to resolve the problem of securing life.

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... As several authors have pointed out, in various connections, locally prepared implementation plans responding to global agendas often disregard locale-specific factors (Samimian-Darash, Henner-Shapira, & Daviko, 2016;Wanderer, 2017), with these dynamics often being rooted in post-colonialist relations between countries (Anderson, 2014;Berghs, 2016;Pallister-Wilkins, 2016). It is important to remember that localities differ greatly in their standing in the field that has come to be known as global health (Biehl, 2016). ...
... Rather, the arguments presented in the previous section are in keeping with the idea of occupying several sites where pandemic threats and emergencies are dealt with while looking at emerging patterns that might appear across them. With this approach, I attempt to escape from totalising narratives of pandemic preparedness and from any focus on prominent -and, again, often also totalising -national cases, such as that often found bundled with the US (Samimian-Darash et al., 2016). ...
... Several pieces of literature point to possible ways to focus in this endeavour. These works have focused on laboratories (MacPhail, 2014), on community preparedness (Caduff, 2015), on state officials (Samimian-Darash et al., 2016), on specific national contexts (Lakoff, 2007;, and on farms (Keck, 2015). These are noted not to separate the sites into isolated subsets but to stress that different starting points lead to different destinations. ...
Thesis
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In April 2009, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared influenza A H1N1 a public-health emergency of international concern. This event was especially significant for marking the first pandemic outbreak to fall under 2005’s new International Health Regulations, an ambitious binding agreement to regulate international health. Since then, other communicable diseases have provoked similar international responses, with Ebola and Zika among the latest examples. Each of them has occasioned scrutiny of the ability of national and international health organisations – the WHO among them – to handle health threats and emergencies situated at global level. Among the issues recurrently rearing their head amid controversy are uniformity in enforcement of international regulations across contexts, promotion of specific lines of research, rapid development of new drugs, the management of local and international health-care workers’ activities, and engagement with local populations. One of the main ways in which health organisations respond to the uncertainty generally associated with pandemic threats is through biopreparedness policies – policies that articulate response and resource management mechanisms before a pandemic event is declared or even before its characteristics are known. The thesis examines the discourses and practices of institutional and scientific actors, for greater understanding of how knowledge is constructed and later carried into implementation in such conditions of uncertainty. The focus is placed on processes of boundary-making, categorisation, and identification. The analysis of how health and scientific institutions identify, categorise, and describe the various human and nonhuman actors involved in pandemic events employs theoretical tools from science and technology studies, Foucauldian approaches, and understandings of the more-than-human in the social sciences. These shed light on the boundaries, categories, and identities at play during pandemic processes as shared among the many humans, animals, and molecular forms of life involved in pandemic events. The approach of assemblage ethnography is engaged with as an aid to navigating digital and material networks of public health from an empirical perspective. Public documents, interviews with public-health professionals, and field visits linked with diverse international organisations are used in combination with items of scientific news and articles from various journals to illuminate how pandemic threats and emergencies unfold. The empirical work suggests that knowledge-making in institutional and scientific settings always involves notions of threat and protection. In the material analysed, there is a tendency to identify and categorise a given actor as threatening, vulnerable (in need of protection), or expert (able to protect). This argument is unfolded in tandem with discussion of three, interconnected areas of focus in pandemic preparedness and response wherein boundaries are made: 1) the establishment of governmental stand-by networks, 2) knowledge-making and knowledge distribution practices, and 3) the conceptualisation and governance of threatening life. Each of these areas connects with one of the three main lines of analytically grounded argument. Firstly, institutional boundaries are challenged in efforts to construct more prepared governmental networks that are able to protect societies from pandemic threats and emergencies. As these networks emerge mostly in a context of uncertain and virtual threats, they impose a need for threats’ identification and characterisation. Secondly, practices of making and distributing knowledge are productive in that they determine the boundaries between expert, vulnerable, and threatening assemblages, creating differentiated communities by regulating who can produce knowledge and who may access it. The third main area of discussion involves how, from a governmental perspective, certain life forms (both human and nonhuman) come to be identified as hybrid threats because of its sociotechnical interactions. Such hybridity is a key element for the design of pandemic governance and response measures. Accordingly, the way in which actors are categorised in terms of threat, vulnerability, and expertise is defined with regard to their engagement with elements such as space, technology, nationality, and gender. The thesis concludes with discussion of three ways in which boundary-making, categorisation, and identification processes interact with pandemic preparedness and response: 1) by shedding light on the establishment of more-than-human modes of pandemic governance; 2) by drawing attention to the need for portable, permeable, and flexible boundaries between threat and protection; and 3) by considering how boundary-making reinforces intersectional inequalities in international health. These conclusions point to a need to incorporate, from both an academic and a policy perspective, alternative pandemic narratives that pay heed to the intersectional, changing, and situated definitions of threat and protection.
... Three features of this literature are particularly noteworthy: First, extant research is characterised by a focus on Europe and North America, thereby reflecting the influence that these regions of the world exert on global biosecurity policies and discourses . This includes single-country and comparative studies on, amongst others, Australia, France, Germany, Israel, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and the United States (Houser et al., 2023;Lentzos & Rose, 2009;Maye et al., 2012;Rappert & Gould, 2009;Samimian-Darash et al., 2016). There are significantly fewer works on non-Western countries, including Asian nations such as India, Japan and Korea, but see Makino (2013). ...
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This article offers an in‐depth analysis of the meaning and scope of biosafety and biosecurity in China, thereby relating domestic debates to global developments, exploring notions of safety and security in public policy more broadly and embedding a key policy initiative, Chinaʼs new Biosecurity Law , into attempts by Chinaʼs leadership to develop a holistic national security strategy. The article finds that biotic threats have more recently been reframed as matters of national security, in ways that undeniably go beyond conventional understandings of biosecurity and that blur the boundaries to more accident‐focused biosafety measures. Given Chinaʼs political and economic importance this apparent trend to securitise biotic risks is likely to impact on global trade relations, international transport and passenger traffic, not the least in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative.
... Multilateral organisations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) have warned that the COVID-19 pandemic might not be the "big one" that epidemiologists have long feared. 1 Since the first reports of the coronavirus began circulating, the WHO has repeatedly called for increased surveillance and the need to prepare for even deadlier pandemics in the future. Even before the pandemic, directions for different kinds of international relations in complex networks, filiations and connections were featured in scholarship on "biosecurity" from the fields of geography, anthropology, and political science (Mutsaers, 2015;Samimian-Darash et al. 2016). Building on Michel Foucault's theory of biopolitics, which had emphasised problems of circulation and unmediated flows of natural phenomena in national citizenries, the biosecurity scholarship emphasised the interwoven aspects of contagion and infectivity. ...
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I begin with my impressions of a narrative of redemption that is caught up in the formation of new environmental, social, and political aspirations for the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. I then reflect on, first, pre-pandemic scholarship on "biosecurity" and, second, taking up a variation of the syndemic approach to understanding the COVID-19 pandemic. I end by arguing that we should not expect to live with "new normals" for living in a post-COVID-19 world that leaves intact "old normals" that have historically contributed to the rise of anthropogenic environmental harms and inegalitarian social arrangements in the world today.
... The rise of pathogen sequence data is also introducing new stratifications into the field of international security: there are countries in the world capable now of using sequence data to better secure their populations against health-based threats, while many other countries occupy a much more subaltern position of mostly being asked to freely share their sequence data with the rest of the world (Go, 2016;see Harding, 2011;Helmy et al., 2016;Reardon, 2017). More broadly, all these emergent molecular practices around sequential life are also buttressing the wider field of global health security (Kamradt-Scott, 2015;Rushton, 2019;Rushton and Youde, 2014;Samimian-Darash et al., 2016) by raising awareness about the continual presence of biological danger, and by facilitating enhanced molecular strategies for developing new medical countermeasures. The pathogen genetic sequence data being generated inside of scientific laboratories are thus becoming deeply entangled with the wider field of (bio)security (see Hoijtink and Leese, 2019;Vogel et al., 2017). ...
Article
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Global health emergencies – like COVID-19 – pose major and recurring threats in the 21st century. Now societies can be better protected against such harrowing outbreaks by analysing the detailed genetic sequence data of new pathogens. Why, then, is this valuable epistemic resource frequently withheld by stakeholders – hamstringing the international response and potentially putting lives at risk? This article initiates the social scientific study of bioinformational diplomacy, that is, the emerging field of tensions, sensitivities, practices and enabling instruments surrounding the timely international exchange of bioinformation about global health emergencies. The article genealogically locates this nascent field at the intersection of molecularised life, informationalised biology and securitised health. It investigates the deeper political, economic and scientific problematisations that are engendering this burgeoning field. It finally analyses the emergent international instruments developed by governments, scientists and industry to facilitate more rapid global sharing of bioinformation through novel practices of data passporting. Overall, the in-depth study of bioinformational diplomacy reveals just how deeply, and even constitutively, international relations are entangled with the life sciences – by carefully tracing how laboratory practices of sequencing life at molecular scale also end up recontouring the play of sovereignty, power and security in international relations.
... conceptualization efforts made by science and technology studies (STS) from the 1980s to 2000s to better understand the science/policy interface and (ii) subsequent applications in international relations (IR), where several international institutions meant to be science/policy interfaces have been established. So far, STS boundary conceptualizations and international studies have been only cautiously studied together, with a few exceptions in security studies (for instance, Samimian-Darash, Henner-Shapira, & Daviko, 2016). There are, however, good reasons to believe in fertile hybridization outcomes for both academic disciplines, especially with regard to the analysis of international institutions. ...
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Recently the Israeli Parliament passed legislation regarding all aspects of assisted reproductive techniques, including surrogacy. The main points of this legislation are presented and discussed. The most important aspects are: (i) a public committee authorizes and supervises every single case; (ii) only full surrogacy is permitted; (iii) the agreement is not commercial, reasonable expenses can be paid to the surrogate mother under the supervision of the Approving Committee; (iv) the surrogate mother must be single or divorced; (v) under certain conditions the surrogate mother can withdraw from the agreement; (vi) the child is under the tutelage of a social worker, representing the state, from birth until the completion of the adoption procedure. The religious, social and legal status of surrogate pregnancies worldwide are discussed.
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The sociological study of boundary-work and the political-ecomomic approach of principal-agent theory can be complementary ways of examining the relationship between society and science: boundary-work provides the empirical nuance to the principal-agent scheme, and principal-agent theory provides structure to the thick boundary description. This paper motivates this complementarity to examine domestic technology transfer in the USA from the intramural laboratories of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). It casts US policy for technology transfer in the principal-agent framework, in which politicians attempt to manage the moral hazard of the productivity of research by providing specific incentives to the agents for engaging in measurable research-based innovation. Such incentives alter the previously negotiated boundary between politics and science. The paper identifies the crucial role of the NIH Office of Technology Transfer (OTT) as a boundary organization, which medicates the new boundary negotiations in its routine work, and stabilizes the boundary by performing successfully as an agent for both politicians and scientists. The paper hypothesizes that boundary organizations like OTT are general phenomena at the boundary between politics and science.
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By the end of the Clinton administration, the claim that terrorists armed with biological weapons represented a huge threat to the security of the United States had achieved the status of received knowledge. How this linkage was forged, despite informed dissent not only outside the Clinton administration but also within it, and how it was used to justify a radical reframing of biological knowledge, especially in genetic engineering and genomics, in terms of military goals is the subject of this essay. My method is historical. I assume that no category is fixed but, rather, that key terms, such as "weapons of mass destruction," "biological weapon," and "terrorism" itself, are contingent, shaped under specific historical and political circumstances, and are therefore more fluid than often thought. This account draws on a wide variety of sources including government documents, policy papers and books, conference records, media materials, memoirs, and detailed interviews with nine subjects selected from among participants in the events examined. It shows that the nature of a linkage between terrorism and biological weaponry was debated at many levels in Washington, and it offers reasons why, ultimately, a counterbioterrorism "bandwagon" was constructed and began rolling at the end of the second Clinton administration.
Biosecurity: The Socio-politics of Invasive Species and Infectious Diseases
  • A Dobson
  • K Barker
  • Taylor
  • Sl
  • Star SL
The balance between free agency and causation in the liberal-democratic theory of action
  • Y Ezrahi
Biotechnology Research in an Age of Terrorism (Fink Report) Available at Google Scholar
  • Research National
  • Council