What can IR learn from disability studies? Debility, capacity and power in the case of COVID-19

This paper argues that disability studies provides the tools for International Relations (IR) to better understand power in relation to global health. The paper offers two main theoretical claims to demonstrate this. First, the paper shows that disability studies makes visible the disableist and colonial power relations that underlie dominant conceptualisations of health. Second, the paper demonstrates that disability studies helps us to understand health not as a product of social relationships, but as a mode of governance. The paper argues that health is used to structure hierarchical relationships between bodies, revealing that health interventions are tied up in biopolitical racialised and (dis)ableist expressions of state power. To illustrate these arguments, the paper conducts an analysis of UK government policy in response to COVID-19. Applying insights from disability studies to the case study of COVID policy reveals the ways in which the debilitation of minority ethnic and disabled communities in order to capacitate others was not an unforeseen policy consequence, but a result of lockdown policy working as intended. Disability studies, then, can help show IR how power operates and circulates through relationships of health.