Project description
Revitalising historical public health cooperation in the MENA region
Sanitary councils in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region were collaboratively established by Europeans, Americans and locals in major cities from the 1790s to the 1940s to tackle epidemics and pandemics and overcome various barriers to cooperation. Yet, a comparative analysis of their operations is missing. The ERC-funded COOPERATION project will seek out rare archives and reveal historical insights into international public health collaboration in the MENA region and beyond. By presenting an entangled history of health cooperation, the project aims to challenge mainstream narratives and shift the focus from top-down to bottom-up processes. COOPERATION will explore the preconditions necessary for international public health cooperation and highlight the roles of local actors and smaller European powers.
Objective
This project will recapture the lost archives and historical knowledge of international public health cooperation between the global north and the global south by analysing its first and longest-lasting instances: the sanitary councils in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Established in Tangier, Alexandria, Tunis, Istanbul and Tehran, these unprecedented institutions strategised against waves of epidemics and pandemics between the 1790s and the 1940s. Their European, American and native co-founders invented new models for fighting pandemics from below and stopping the diseases in their tracks. They continually strove to overcome the familiar barriers to cooperation posed by inter-imperial competition in a multipolar world, economic inequities, protests against quarantine restrictions and racial and Orientalist biases, among others. In this light, the councils constituted the microcosms of the complex dynamics of north-south health cooperation that also need to be addressed urgently today. However, to date, there has been no in-depth, comparative and longitudinal analysis of their workings. This project will challenge the mainstream narratives by writing an entangled, rather than West-centric, history of health cooperation and by shifting the focus from top-down to bottom-up processes. It will determine what the preconditions for effective international public health cooperation in MENA were and hypothesise that rather than Great Power imposition or veiled imperialism alone, multifaceted reciprocal action induced and sustained sanitary internationalism on the ground. My preliminary data show that the agency of local actors and smaller and medium European powers in accrediting public health cooperation was more central than has been documented to date. This research will test my hypothesis by examining the councils activity, performance, legitimacy and endurance, and by consulting archival sources in Europe, MENA, North America and Russia.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- humanities history and archaeology history
- medical and health sciences health sciences public health epidemiology pandemics
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2023-COG
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3584 CS Utrecht
Netherlands
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