The Biosurveillance State: Health Data, Borders, and Power - Couverture rigide

Azeemi, Rukhsar

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 9377941474 ISBN 13 : 9789377941475

Editeur : Vij Books, 2026

Synopsis

From nineteenth-century quarantine stations to smartphone health passes, states have long used disease to justify controlling movement. The Biosurveillance State shows how, in the twenty-first century, systems built to protect public health are being folded into broader architectures of security, border control, and digital identity. Tracing the evolution of biosurveillance across clinics, airports, refugee camps, and data centres, the book reveals how health information increasingly determines who may cross a border, access services, or retain legal status.

Rukhsar Azeemi examines electronic digital health records, biometric identifiers, outbreak monitoring tools, and emergency data-sharing regimes as interlocking infrastructures rather than isolated technologies. Drawing on debates in global health, critical security studies, and law, the book explains why governments collect health data, how it circulates between agencies, and how new forms of border control and migration management emerge from seemingly technical reforms. It scrutinises citizen scoring schemes, risk classifications, and pandemic dashboards, asking when screening becomes exclusion and when temporary emergency powers quietly become permanent.

Written in an accessible yet rigorous style, The Biosurveillance State speaks to students and researchers in public health, international relations, sociology, and law, as well as practitioners grappling with data-intensive policy. General readers concerned about surveillance, inequality, and the future of mobility will find a guide to navigating confusing technical and legal debates. By the end of the book, readers will be able to recognise recurring patterns in proposals for new health-security systems, assess who benefits and who bears the risks, and articulate principles for infrastructures that protect collective health without surrendering democratic oversight or human dignity.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Rukhsar Azeemi writes and thinks at the intersection of global health, migration, and the politics of data. In this book, Azeemi brings an editorial and analytical voice that treats policy documents, technical standards, and personal testimonies as equally significant clues to how power works. Rather than accepting official categories at face value, their work lingers over the frictions between what systems promise and what people experience.Attentive to postcolonial and critical security perspectives, Azeemi is especially interested in how borders are built not only from fences and checkpoints but from clinics, databases, and risk scores. Histories of colonial medicine, quarantine islands, and pilgrimage routes inform the questions posed here, as do contemporary debates over digital identity and emergency powers. The result is a style of inquiry that moves easily between legal language, sociological theory, and grounded case material.Committed to clarity without simplification, Azeemi writes for readers who want to understand complex infrastructures without being overwhelmed by jargon. The aim is not to rehearse familiar arguments about privacy alone, but to show how health data, mobility, and citizenship are being rewired together. In doing so, Azeemi invites readers to see biosurveillance not as an inevitable by-product of progress, but as a set of choices that can be interrogated, resisted, and reimagined.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Vij Books
• Date d'édition: 2026
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 9377941474
• ISBN 13: 9789377941475
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 402
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Allemagne