Starting in the 1950s, immunity became a central problem of international governance and life science as international organizations like the World Health Organization, transnational Marxist groups, and multinational pharmaceutical companies used scientific research and practices around immunology to produce a new politics of human security across socialist and capitalist Europe as well as former colonies in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. This project draws on archives in Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States, the Czech Republic, Denmark, and Australia to argue that, over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, threats to the health of populations in international politics shifted from an emphasis on environmental pathogenic dangers to a concern with internal vulnerabilities of immune defence.
This project integrates the scientific history of immunology, the international history of health and welfare, and the intellectual history of "immunity" in political thought to bring together the defence of the human body with the security of the "body politic" of the state. In providing the first political and intellectual history of immunology, it demonstrates how the porosity of both bodies and states were inextricable and enduring concerns in postwar international politics.