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Enacting a depoliticised alterity: Law and traditional medicine at the World Health Organization.

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Michael AshworthORCiD

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Abstract

This paper interrogates the depoliticising effects of a seemingly neutral regulatory drive at the heart of the World Health Organization (WHO)'s promotion of traditional medicine. Emerging at WHO in the late 1960s against a political backdrop of decolonisation and pan-Africanism, traditional medicine has continued to be promoted in subsequent decades, culminating in the latest global Traditional Medicine Strategy (2014 to 2023). Yet WHO's promotion and acceptance of traditional medicine have also become increasingly conditional upon its standardisation and regulation – something that appears fundamentally at odds with traditional medicine's heterogeneity. Drawing on insights from critical law and science and technology studies, we suggest that such a process at WHO has done more than simply disqualify the toxic and the dangerous. Rather, it has implicitly and explicitly marginalised and excluded those aspects of traditional medicine that deviate from scientific, biomedical ways of seeing, knowing and organising.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Ashworth M, Cloatre E

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: International Journal of Law in Context

Year: 2022

Volume: 18

Issue: 4

Pages: 476-498

Print publication date: 01/12/2022

Online publication date: 19/04/2022

Acceptance date: 01/03/2022

Date deposited: 28/06/2024

ISSN (print): 1744-5523

ISSN (electronic): 1744-5531

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1744552322000143

DOI: 10.1017/S1744552322000143

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