August 2016
·
18 Reads
This dissertation presents three studies that reimagine the definition and role of international law to address transnational health threats and social inequalities. The first chapter assesses opportunities for traditional international laws to promote global health, specifically examining when and why global health treaties may be helpful. Evidence from 90 quantitative impact evaluations of past treaties was synthesized and an analytic framework was developed. The second chapter builds on this work by evaluating a broad range of opportunities for working towards global collective action on antimicrobial resistance, including those that involve building institutions, crafting incentives and mobilizing interests. This chapter argues that their real-world impact will depend on strong accountability relationships. The third chapter takes this dissertation beyond traditional Westphalian notions of collective action by exploring whether new disruptive technologies can theoretically provide the same global regulatory effects on health matters as state-negotiated international laws. As a first move, this chapter presents a relatively simple machine-learning model that automatically quantifies the relevance, scientific quality and sensationalism of news media records, and validates the model on a corpus of 163,433 news records mentioning the recent SARS and H1N1 pandemics.