Short Abstract

This is an "authors meet critics" session for a new monograph entitled "Peak Pharma: Toward a New Political Economy of Health", published in Dec. 2025 by Oxford University Press. The two authors, S. Geiger and T. Bourgeron, will respond to two to three critics (to be appointed).

Description

This is an "authors meet critics" session for a new monograph entitled "Peak Pharma: Toward a New Political Economy of Health", published in Dec. 2025 by Oxford University Press.

Peak Pharma argues that the neoliberal pharmaceutical system is reaching its ‘peak’ in several vital respects—peak pricing, peak concentration, peak financialization, and peak expansion. It uses the term to signal the crisis and possible end of an era-defining business model in the pharmaceutical sector. The book presents a synthesis of the authors’ decade-long empirical investigations into social movements contesting the pharmaceutical market. It brings together a large body of knowledge that is currently spread across political economy, sociology, STS, organization studies, and the history of medicine, to follow the neoliberal dynamics that have engendered an acceleration towards ‘peak’ over the span of the last 40 years. It traces the emergence of different voices and groups that have contested this evolution, particularly around specific crisis points and revelatory moments, including the fight for access to HIV/AIDS medicines, the global health era, pharmaceutical corporate social responsibility, the advent of personalized medicine and digital health, Covid-19, and others. The authors trace the shifting coalitions between the pharmaceutical industry, patient organizations, and governments that kept propping up the neoliberal value system throughout this evolution. They show that the recent acceleration towards peak has led many centrist voices from patient organizations, academia, and politics to start changing course from market repair to imagining alternative pharmaceutical economies, prominently including imaginaries around the pharmaceutical commons. The book closes with a set of recommendations for policymakers and civil society actors interested in fostering a new political economy of health.

During this session, two or three critics will discuss this book, and authors will respond.