Jens Holst

Nasir Jafar and colleagues made another attempt to redefine 'global health'. In their attempt to redefine, or rather reinterpret, global health, the authors make two important restrictions. Reducing global health to humanitarian aid provided by a single country, and to the field of biomedicine and clinical services blatantly neglects both the meaning of "global" as "universal" and the complexity of global health as an explicitly political concept. Due to the fundamental reductionism reflected in the commentary of Nasir Jafar et al., the approach is unlikely to make a relevant contribution to decolonising global health, as it diverts the attention from the far more relevant upstream determinants of global health and health inequalities. A rapid response to the article questions the arguments published in BMJ Global Health 9 (2): e014487.