This panel is organized as a four-paper formal session with a chair and commentator and brings together scholars from diverse regional and institutional backgrounds (Africa, America, Europe, and the Middle East). It examines public health as a historically contingent arena in which medical knowledge, state authority, social inequality, and local and foreign actors intersect. Spanning from the late nineteenth century to the COVID-19 pandemic and drawing on case studies from Nigeria, Turkey, and Slovakia, the session highlights chronological, geographic, and methodological diversity while foregrounding shared questions about coercion, negotiation, and power in public health governance.

The panel is organized chronologically, tracing the evolution of public health interventions from the colonial period to the present. The first paper focuses on British colonial smallpox vaccination in Eastern Nigeria. It demonstrates how the introduction of the vaccine and the implementation of vaccination laws led to indigenous resistance as well as negotiated adoption. Drawing on colonial medical reports and archival documents, the presentation shows that resistance was less about religious beliefs and more a response to coercive colonial mechanisms and socioeconomic pressures.

The second paper examines broader British imperial health interventions in Igboland from the late nineteenth century to 1960. It demonstrates how the Igbo maintained a sophisticated healthcare system grounded in spiritual and empirical knowledge prior to conquest and how British medical policies disrupted and devalued indigenous practices. Together with the first paper, this study highlights the complex negotiations between colonial authority, local knowledge, and public health interventions in Nigeria.

The third paper turns to a different region where local and foreign actors collaborated for the improvement of public health and medical practices. It examines American philanthropic and government-led public health programs in Turkey from the late 1920s to the 1970s. Focusing on initiatives by the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, the Marshall Plan, and USAID, it traces the modernization of the Turkish public health sector through disease eradication campaigns and family planning programs, while demonstrating how public health initiatives served U.S. Cold War strategic interests.

The final paper addresses a topic that has become familiar to us all. It investigates Slovakia’s COVID-19 response targeting marginalized Roma communities in 2020–2021. Using qualitative content analysis, government documents, and oral histories, it analyzes militarized quarantines and securitized interventions that violated fundamental rights and freedoms, showing how contemporary public health policies can reproduce social inequalities and reflect racialized assumptions.

Together, these papers examine the intersections of public health, medicine, politics, law, and society, highlighting continuities and divergences in the use of public health as a tool of governance and social control across time and place. The panel employs diverse methodologies and covers multiple regions, including Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. It also brings together graduate students as well as early-career and senior scholars engaged in interdisciplinary work. The session targets scholars of global history, colonial and postcolonial studies, the history of science and medicine, social and racial inequalities, and Cold War studies, while also appealing to a broader audience.