Adapting to win: how insurgents fight and defeat foreign states in war
capacity in Chapter 5, and the abovementioned comment on the 'entire ethos of the global health security regime' I would have expected a deeper exploration of why that ethos left so few traces in the IHR. The implicit answer can be found in Chapter 2, which addresses how the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic constituted the tipping point, leading to the extensive revision of the IHR. SARS hardly affected low income countries at all. It spread from China, to Viet Nam and Hong Kong, and further into Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Germany, Canada and the USA. For SARS, the problem was not weak capacity, but weak political will to report and to cooperate. Weak capacity was somewhat overlooked. If the IHR are revised again, in the near future, will weak capacity and the ways to overcome it, including international financial cooperation be included? The answer to that question will not be found here, obviously. However, global health scholars who would like to see international financial cooperation included in the next iteration of the IHR can learn a lot from this book. What it takes is 'a critical mass of states, persuading them to cease being apathetic (or even resistant) to a set of new collective behavioural expectations concerning infectious disease outbreak' (p. 52) and then, of course, to persuade them that international public financing of health systems is part of the collective behavioural expectations.