Global health diplomacy and North Korea in the COVID-19 era

ABSTRACT

This article uses global health diplomacy to examine the challenges and opportunities of international health aid to North Korea in the COVID-19 era. It finds that vaccine provision is both within the enlightened self-interest of donor states and meets the global responsibility to address unequal access to vaccines. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed increasing global inequality in responding to the issues of health. How do we resolve the tension between normative concerns for global responsibility and strategic concerns for national interest in facilitating health aid to vulnerable populations in low-income countries in the COVID-19 era? This article presents global health diplomacy as a conceptual framework that could overcome thedichotomy of humanitarianism and international politics, using health aid to North Korea during COVID-19 as a case-study. Health is a critical component of human dignity and can be a normative motivation for cooperation beyond sovereign borders. However, health is also an important element of national interest and can be a strategic motivation for transnational cooperation. The overlap between the moral and rational spaces in global health diplomacy demonstrates how COVID-19 assistance to North Korea's vulnerable population is in the enlightened self-interest of donors to prevent resurgences of new COVID-19 variants. Moreover, this framework imbues all parties, including aid recipients such as North Korea, with the global cooperative responsibility to address health. In this sense, global health diplomacy can reframe the tensions between humanitarianism and politics, morality and rationality, and cosmopolitanism and nationalism, from antithetical to complementary.