How to think politically about epidemics: a retrospective and a rejoinder

ABSTRACT

Cholera – a bacterial infection of the intestine that is easy to prevent but deadly when left untreated – emerges and thrives where modern water and sanitation services have broken down, where people live in squalid and overcrowded conditions, where immune systems are weakened by malnutrition or concomitant infection. For Reddy, this argument underplays the limits of humanitarian responses to achieve more development-oriented transformation. [...]she points out that I don’t give quite enough analysis to the historical role that international organizations have played in Zimbabwe. For Muinde, my book shows how the cholera epidemic shaped new experiences of citizenship among Harare’s urban poor it tapped into historical expectations of public service delivery, it provided an avenue for township residents to air outrage at the structural inequality in the city and at their political abjection, and it channelled fears about an increasingly fragile future.