In Eastern Europe during the interwar years, a model of global health and the understanding and practice of health as a human right emerged from state-building and international collaboration. Political and public health experiments in this post-imperial space promoted the ideas and institutions that established public responsibility for health both nationally and internationally, and set a precedent for international collaboration to support a state’s capacity to protect social and economic rights. As a result, a broadly-defined right to health and global health initiatives that actively protected human security went from unimaginable to uncontroversial in the space of a few decades.  Professor Sara Silverstein, Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut Department of History and the Gladstein Family Rights Institute, and the co-director of the Human Rights Institute’s Research Program on Humanitarianism, is an historian of modern and Eastern Europe specializing in migration, displacement, state forms, internationalism and statelessness. She is the author of For Your Health and Ours: An Eastern European History of Global Health (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2026). Silverstein specializes in the history of internationalism, public and global health, the right to health, and state-building and democracy in Eastern Europe.