Securitization of Covid-19: The case of the World Health Organization

The post-Cold War era has been witnessing the transformation of the concept of security. One of the new issue areas in security studies has been health and more specifically infectious diseases. Infectious diseases are inseparable parts of human history and thus, have led to the emergence of cooperation on the area of global health and the World Health Organization. The Covid-19 outbreak, which emerged in December 2019 in China, has resulted in renewed emphasis on the health dimension of security by threatening the whole world from the individual to the international system. This study aims to examine the response of the World Health Organization to the Covid-19 outbreak within the securitization framework. In this respect, the discourses of the Director-General Dr. Tedros are analyzed from the emergence of the Covid-19 outbreak until it turned into a pandemic. In this context, there are three main arguments of thesis. First, after declaring the Covid-19 outbreak a "public health emergency of international concern", the World Health Organization's Director-General framed the problem as a threat to limited communities rather than the international community as a whole. Second, the international community could not develop a "we-feeling" after the Covid-19 pandemic was framed as a global security problem by the Director-General of the World Health Organization. Third, the analysis reveals that the process of securitization of the Covid-19 pandemic can not be considered as independent from objective threaths. Keywords: Covid-19 pandemic, World Health Organization, securitization, macro securitization