As one of the world’s worst public health emergencies of recent history, the unfolding Ebola crisis is now rapidly revealing the limits of global health governance. Infection rates of Ebola have already spiraled out of control in three African countries – taking the lives of thousands, destroying the livelihoods of many more, and potentially damaging the economies and political systems of several West African countries. The slow response of the international community lacked coordination and leadership for several months, directly contributing to the extent of the current crisis. And after several weeks of inaction, several governments then leaped from complacency to emergency mode – rapidly mobilizing military personnel and equipment, even persuading the United Nations Security Council to declare Ebola ‘a threat to international peace and security’. Drugs and vaccines against Ebola that were lingering in laboratories for years, are suddenly being rushed into clinical trials and approved for emergency use even without extensive clinical trials in humans.

The international response to the Ebola crisis is not only deeply disturbing – it is also puzzling. It comes after a decade of unprecedented investment in global health and on the heels of intense international preparations for responding to new infectious disease outbreaks. Following a whole series of infectious disease outbreaks – from HIV/AIDS, SARS, and H5N1 through to H1N1, MERS and H7N9, pandemic preparedness had risen to the top of the international political agenda in recent years. Unprecedented investment was directed towards new surveillance systems, towards renegotiating the International Health Regulations, and towards devising a new pandemic preparedness framework under the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO). In that context, the turn of events in West Africa is deeply perplexing. This workshop will bring together leading scholars of global health governance broadly conceived to: 1) explore the implications of the Ebola crisis for our understanding of the international politics of health; 2) to generate insights based on recent global health scholarship in International Relations (IR) that may feed into the international response; and 3) to identify future research needs revealed by the crisis.