Contemporary crises increasingly draw health systems, humanitarian access, medical supply chains, and civilian protection into security-oriented governance. While the health consequences of war and economic coercion, and geopolitical rivalry are widely documented, less attention has been paid to the discursive processes through which such consequences are rendered legitimate, unavoidable, or politically peripheral. This paper addresses this gap by applying a critical geopolitics framework and critical discourse analysis to examine how geopolitical narratives may structure health-relevant governance during crises. Drawing on a purposive, illustrative corpus - (i) a primary corpus of institutional and policy discourse (state communications, United Nations and World Health Organization documents, sanctions guidance, and international non-governmental organizations' reports) and (ii) a secondary corpus of scholarly literature, the study identifies three recurring discursive mechanisms: securitization, exception-making, and displacement of responsibility. Across five illustrative case contexts-US-China geopolitical rivalry, the Russia-Ukraine war, the Israel-Palestine/Gaza crisis, Iran-related sanctions and protest governance, and US-Venezuela sanctions governance-the analysis suggests how security narratives can condition humanitarian access, reshape the practical meaning of civilian protection, and diffuse accountability for health harms. Rather than arguing that discourse alone causes health outcomes, the paper treats discourse as one governance condition among others: it influences what becomes politically thinkable and institutionally actionable while interacting with military, economic, legal, and health-system factors. The findings advance critical health geopolitics and peace and security scholarship by showing how health inequities can function as a diagnostic lens through which norm erosion and the normalization of exceptional governance become empirically visible.Clinical trial numberNot applicable.
Khorram‐Manesh et al. (Tue,) studied this question.