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Paper short abstract:

This paper charts how zoonotic and vector-borne disease control programs link sociotechnial infrastructures, financial institutions, and bureaucratic systems to contain animal bodies, animal pathogens, and animal capital in new, trans-Asian regions of biosecurity.

Paper long abstract:

Over the last decade, zoonoses and vector-borne diseases have brought a range of institutions and actors together in a concerted effort to address threats to public health. These responses are articulated on the one hand within a One World, One Health agenda that seeks to integrate human, animal, and environmental health; and on the other hand within a biosecurity order that seeks to manage health security on a global scale. While proponents of these processes celebrate the worldwide reach of newly connected experts and institutions, critics point to damaging extraterritorial interventions in at-risk locales. Yet, the topologies of transboundary disease control are more nuanced than global and local imaginings suggest. In this paper, I posit regions as the primary scales and spaces for identifying and addressing transboundary diseases. In Asia, One World, One Health biosecurity regimes integrate sociotechnical devices and shoe leather epidemiology to map the circulations of animal collectives: animal bodies, animal pathogens, and animal capital. These animal collectives traverse and divide space in ways that resist local, national, and even global approaches to health governance. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research in East and Southeast Asia, I chart how disease control programs link commodity chains, sociotechnical infrastructures, financial institutions, and bureaucratic systems in order to capture and contain animal collectives in new, trans-Asian regions of biosecurity. These biosecure regions, moreover, are articulated within and against more sedimented spaces of security forged by historical efforts to contain other threatening collectives in Asia: colonial subjects and Communist agitators.