Beneath the rhetoric of global justice: Reinforcement of global hegemonic governmentality by South Korea's Global Vaccine Hub Project.

Background: During the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, the South Korean government initiated the Global Vaccine Hub Project (GVHP) purportedly to address global vaccine inequality. This study analyzes the strategies and underlying epistemology of GVHP through the perspective of global governmentality. Critical Discourse Study (CDS) approaches were used to identify governmental technologies and explain how their embedded knowledge is related to power relations.

Results: The findings reveal that GVHP merely pursues national interests by implementing governmental technologies, such as calculative practice, support to private companies, patent protection and circumvention, and pursuing vaccine diplomacy. The South Korean government considered the pandemic an economic and diplomatic opportunity to become an advanced country. The governmental strategies resulted in the depoliticization of vaccines and facilitated the government's opposition to other alternatives, such as an intellectual property waiver at the World Trade Organization level.

Conclusion: This study argues that the failure of global pandemic governance does not imply the failure of global governmentality; rather, the success of neoliberal global governmentality made global solidarity challenging.