Caecilie Böck Buhmann

The role of health professionals in preventing and mediating conflict

Since the early 1980s academics, governmental and non-governmental organisations have undertaken field projects inspired by the Peace through Health and similar concepts formulated by the World Health Organisation and the Department of Peace Studies at McMaster University, Canada. These have been criticised for lack of proper evaluation, the appropriateness of the skills of health workers involved, and the overall usefulness of the approach. This article, based on a literature review, compares existing evidence with the theoretical framework. There is still a lack of systematic evaluation, but no direct disproof of Peace through Health theory. It is concluded that the Peace through Health approach can have a positive impact on healing and reconciliation on a community scale, but there is no evidence of a peace impact on a larger scale.

The roles of the health sector and health workers before, during and after violent conflict.

Starting with a view of war as a significant population health problem, this article explores the roles of health workers in relation to violent conflict. Four different roles are identified, defined by goals and values – military, development, humanitarian and peace. In addition, four dimensions of health work are seen as cross-cutting factors influencing health work in violent conflict – whether the health worker is an insider or outsider to the conflict, whether they are oriented to primary, secondary or tertiary prevention of the mortality and morbidity of war, whether they take an individual clinical or a population health approach, and whether they are oriented to policy and whole-sector change or not. This article explores the nature of these roles, the influence of these cross-cutting dimensions, the challenges of each role and finally commonalities and possibilities for cooperation between roles.

The nuclear weapons inheritance project: student-to-student dialogues and interactive peer education in disarmament activism.

Abstract The Nuclear Weapons Inheritance Project is a student run and student initiated project founded in 2001 with the purpose of increasing awareness of health effects of nuclear policies and empowering university students to take action in a local and international context. The project uses dialogues to discuss nuclear disarmament with university students and a method of interactive peer education to train new trainers. The project has met more than 1500 students in nuclear weapon states in dialogue and trained about 400 students from all over the world. This article describes the methods and results of the project and discuss how the experience of the project can be used in other projects seeking to increase awareness of a topic and to initiate action on social injustice.

Call for a global response 2010: new internet resource and forthcoming conference to examine the links between violent conflict and health

Health and violent conflict are strongly interconnected. The 20th century has been the bloodiest in the history of mankind. Two world wars and numerous smaller violent conflicts have resulted in more than 110 million deaths, 50 million displaced persons, and the suffering of countless more. Most recently, the violence in Gaza has been estimated to cost 1366 lives and the violent conflict in Iraq has an estimated death toll of 654,965. The Global Burden of Disease Study supported by the World Bank and the WHO estimates that war will be the 20th most common cause of morbidity and mortality in the year 2020. On the basis of numbers alone, it is beyond doubt that limiting the destructiveness of war is a challenge that must be faced. However, unlike other medical specialties, the field of conflict and health has seen limited interaction and innovation. We have several peer-reviewed journals and many active civil society organizations and research institutions. Important written overviews have been published and updated in the past few years and a new course on medical peace work has been developed. However, the conferences and meetings that have been conducted have mostly been for smaller groups of researchers from a niche in the work of violent conflict and health research and no systematic reviews and evidence have been published with the purpose of identifying overall challenges. There is a very little connection between groups from different backgrounds such as the humanitarian organizations, academic workers from teaching institutions and advocacy groups. This has resulted in limited exchange between academic communities and those working in the field and therefore much less innovation and development in understanding than those seen in