Geopolitics of Health in South and Southeast Asia

Vivek Neelakantan is a Southeast Asian medical historian and a 2023 Brocher Visiting Fellow, sponsored by the Brocher Foundation, Switzerland. His current research investigates the origins of primary healthcare in Southeast Asia from a transnational perspective.

• Introduction; 1. "The Monsoon Asia of Geographers": The Cold War Beginnings of the WHO Regional Office for Southeast Asia (SEARO), 1948-60; 2. The Cold War, Non-Alignment and Medicine in India: The Case of Medical Education and Pharmaceutical Self-Sufficiency, 1947-57; 3. Malaria Eradication and Modernization in Maldives and Sri Lanka, 1941-84; 4. Thailand’s Rural Doctor Society in the 1970s and 1980s and its Struggles to Improve Health in the Countryside; 5. Civic Space in Southeast Asia in the Time of COVID-19: The Case of Maritime Southeast Asia; 6. Neighbors Rally Against the Virus: The Case of SAARC

"This book is a welcome addition to the historiography of global health. Its unique focus on region-specific approaches to examining disease eradication allows it to historicise postcolonial nation-states, Cold War politics, and international aid organizations. The range of themes here; from primary health infrastructure in postcolonial India to querying the concept of erosion of civic space in ASEAN countries at the time of coronavirus epidemics, for instance, will interest research scholars as well as the curious general reader." -Nandini Bhattacharya, University of Houston, USA."This volume pioneers the field with an explicit argument for regional history to fill the gaps between global history and transnational and national history. The studies are comprehensive and informative on major issues of integration and divergence of regional history, illustrated by the policies and politics of public health from the Cold War to the pandemic of Covid-19." - Liping Bu, Alma College, Michigan, USA."[This book] brings together a series of works on the regional and national dimensions of global health policies and programmes. [...] this volume defends the regional approach as an action-oriented point of view: it is about reflecting on the successes and failures of regional integration in South and Southeast Asia, showing how ‘diversity of geography, history, and political systems have affected health outcomes across and within countries of both regions’ [...] this collection of works, most of them by researchers who not only carry out their research on Asia but do so from research centres in Asia, unequivocally places South and Southeast Asia at the centre of the world map." -Monica Saavedra, CRIA, Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia, Portugal, Social History of Medicine Vol. XX, No. XX