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Leveraging Germany’s Role in Global Health: View from an Outsider

Establishing a national Center for Global Public Health in Berlin is critical. [Photo: Lothar Drechsel/Getty Images]
In the past decade, Germany has caught the attention of the world for the high-profile moves it has made in the field of global public health. While the country’s contributions to social medicine date back two hundred years to the birth of Rudolf Virchow, the waves it has made in global health are more recent. A 2017 article in the Lancet argued that Germany “has become a visible actor in global health [only] in the past ten years.” The WZB Berlin Social Science Center has been at the center of some of these developments.

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Norms of gender equality and the backlash against Istanbul Convention

Image from Wikimedia Commons, Zagreb March 2018
Banner says “Stop Istanbul (Convention) for Sovereign Croatia”

During the first couple of months of 2018, several countries in Europe witnessed a backlash against the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, widely known as the Istanbul Convention. In February 2018, Bulgarian government decided against the ratification of the Convention pointing out to the lack of popular support. At the same time, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church declared that the Convention opens the door to “moral decay” with its “gender ideology,” which is considered “alien” to Bulgarian society. The governing coalition (GERB) decided to withdraw the Convention from the parliament when faced by the opposition from both its coalition partner and the socialists.

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