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      Global health and the elite capture of decolonization: On reformism and the possibilities of alternate paths

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      PLOS Global Public Health
      Public Library of Science

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          Abstract

          Global Health is experiencing a moment of reckoning over the field’s legacy and current structuring in a world facing multiple, intersecting challenges to health. While “decolonization” has emerged as the dominant frame to imagine change in the field, what the concept refers to and entails has become increasingly unclear. Despite warnings, the concept is now being used by elite Global North institutions and organization to imagine their reformation. In this article, I attempt to provide clarity to the issue of conceptualizing change in Global Health. By first outlining a brief history of decolonial thought and then exploring the current state of the decolonizing global health literature, I show a profound disjuncture between popularized calls for decolonization in Global Health and other theorizations of the term. I then argue that the diluting of “decolonization” into a depoliticized vision of reforming the inherently colonial and capitalistic institutions and organizations of Global Health is an example of “elite capture”—the coopting and reconfiguration of radical, liberatory theories and concepts then used by elites for their own gain. Showing how this elite capture has facilitated harm within the field and beyond, I conclude by calling for resistance to elite capture in all its forms.

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          Red Skin, White Masks

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            The Darker Side of Western Modernity

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              Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Data curationRole: Formal analysisRole: InvestigationRole: MethodologyRole: Writing – original draftRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLOS Glob Public Health
                PLOS Glob Public Health
                plos
                PLOS Global Public Health
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, CA USA )
                2767-3375
                29 June 2023
                2023
                : 3
                : 6
                : e0002103
                Affiliations
                [001] Department of International Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America
                APHRC, KENYA
                Author notes

                The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

                Author information
                https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2350-5357
                Article
                PGPH-D-22-01371
                10.1371/journal.pgph.0002103
                10309605
                37384634
                233627f1-c4a9-41cd-8aa9-3adcc97bbfcb
                © 2023 Daniel W. Krugman

                This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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                Page count
                Figures: 0, Tables: 3, Pages: 18
                Funding
                The authors received no specific funding for this work.
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