Health Consequences and Activists’ Intervention Strategies
Convenors: Oliver Razum (Bielefeld), Iryna Hubeladze (Kyiv), Yudit Namer (Twente), Diego S. Silva (Sydney)

States use citizenship and borders as tools to control and manipulate belonging, i.e., who belongs in a state and who does not. Such state-driven exclusionary processes can be characterized as Othering. The first aim of the workshop is to examine whether different forms of states’ Othering can be conceived as demarcating a continuum. To do this, we focus on three paradigmatic dimensions: (1) abandonment, (2) expulsion of citizens, and (3) exclusion through forcibly shifting or (re)making borders.

We comparatively analyse examples from Australia, Germany, Türkiye, and Ukraine. We assess them for similarities across nations and for continuities over time.

States’ manipulations of belonging and territoriality affect population health. Public Health researchers have studied borders as exclusionary instruments, but so far mostly as protecting population health through stopping transmission of infectious diseases (“health security”). The second aim of our workshop is to examine possible negative (including mental) health effects of states’ Othering.

In turn, civil society has developed various successful counterstrategies to states’ Othering, ranging from legal action to civil disobedience. Our third and final aim is to analyse civil society responses, identifying similarities in responses that can, in turn, help civil society activists optimize their responses and Public Health workers to improve the health of affected population groups.