Abstract
Solidarity is essential for any healthcare system, as it plays a crucial role in nurturing good health on multiple levels. But solidarity also constitutes a rationale for providing international medical aid. In this paper I aim to present key ideas of a research proposal that explores solidarity as a core concept linked to relationality in the context of medical internationalism. Applying a decolonial perspective on contemporary and past Czech medical internationalism, I aspire to explore what particular roles medicine has played as a tool of the soft power diplomacy in the Czech(oslovak) history and in building international relations after the Second World War up to the present. Doing so, I build on a burgeoning field of anthropological and social historical studies of the state socialist medical internationalism that mobilize decolonial perspectives to understand complex power dynamics during and after the Cold war within the global colonial system of power.
In particular, I focus on the Czechoslovakian projects of medical aid to Cuba. I am interested in both lived experiences of those who enacted and were enrolled in such medical international aid, as well as in the global politics of solidarity shaped by particular political objectives of the political actors involved.