2025/12/22 by Maria Cullen, Bertrand Taithe, Janelle Winters · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Medicine · #Global Health and Surgery #Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis #Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s1740022825100223
openalex created_date 2025/12/22 · openalex publication_date 2025/12/22 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
This article considers the history of Emergency Health Kits established by United Nations agencies and the larger medical non-governmental organizations of the 1980s to analyse the significance of standardized responses in humanitarian emergencies. We argue that, far from being a rigid and immutable response, the kits reflected a (not universally realized) desire to standardize and control both supplies and medical care from international organizations. As such, humanitarian medical practice remained a disputed field in which each object or drug was negotiated at the risk of creating innovation traps. Coming at a time of increasingly global logistics capacities, the Emergency Health Kits became a central feature of a more coordinated global marketplace of humanitarian aid. The kits' promise to provide rapid transport of emergency supplies to crisis settings across the world was often experienced as a construct, with long delays and logjams in certain regions. Even so, humanitarian organizations were agents of globalization because they imagined a system of centralized production in the Global North and supply to isolated and/or insecure locations across the world.