Coercive containment of the Africa Group’s Equity Agenda in the WHO Pandemic Treaty negotiations

Abstract Calls to make global health more equitable are laudable but limited by philosophical idealism that obscures how the legal form of health relations between states forecloses equity. Analysing the Africa Group’s equity agenda in the WHO Pandemic Treaty negotiations, we illustrate how the group’s demands for equity were first absorbed into the dominant development rationality, which diluted their transformative potential, and then coercively contained through force. The result is a treaty that affirms equity rhetorically while hollowing it out juridically. Building on and extending Sundhya Pahuja’s account of international law’s ‘critical instability’, we theorise coercive containment as a structural feature of global health law. When Global South claims cannot be ideologically contained, coercion restores stability while preserving inequality. We, therefore, offer a critical account of global health law’s limits in redressing injustice and warn against idealising multilateralism as a path to global health equity.