EVENT - Confronting war, militarisation and global insecurity: Medact’s Health Through Peace forum

Tickets are now available for a two-day event in London organised by charity Medact, which will bring together health and peacebuilding experts to discuss issues in war, armed conflict and militarism, and the role of health professionals in challenging the drivers of conflict.

From 13–14 November 2015, Saferworld will be joining Medact, Oxford Research Group, Kings College London, Quakers in Britain, ICAN UK, Campaign Against Arms Trade and others for Health Through Peace – a forum organised by Medact that will focus on promoting health by tackling the root causes of global insecurity. In recent years the number of direct casualties from armed conflict has risen dramatically: in 2014, there were more conflict deaths than at any time since 1989. Nurses, doctors and other health professionals therefore have an increasingly important role to play in challenging the drivers of war and armed conflict.

After a welcome from Dr Fiona Godlee, editor of the British Medical Journal, day one of the forum will include sessions on a range of drivers of conflict including the arms trade, nuclear weapons, transnational conflict drivers such as the drugs trade, and climate change. An impressive selection of speakers from organisations including Saferworld, International Alert, the Ammerdown Invitation, King’s College London War Studies and Oxfam will explore areas such as redefining what we mean by ‘security’, the geopolitics of the military industrial complex, and the impact of war and conflict on health.

Saferworld’s gender and security advisers, Hannah Wright and Julie Brethfeld, will be running two sessions on gender, militarism and violence. The first will explore the role of gender and other social and cultural norms in determining and shaping war, violence and conflict. The second will take the form of an interactive workshop in which participants will be encouraged to think about gender stereotypes and how these shape their own identities and behaviours. They will be joined by Dr Julia Welland from the University of Warwick and David Brockway from The Great Initiative respectively.

Day two will begin with a welcome by Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, followed by expert panel discussions on war, conflict and militarism as global health issues, and how the health community should respond to these issues. A series of parallel workshops on action planning, advocacy and research will follow.

Find out more and book your tickets.

“Our response to [war, armed conflict and militarism] relies on too narrow an idea of what it means to be secure, whilst we continue to believe that we can protect ourselves from complex threats by military power alone. Doing so in an increasingly inter-connected and fragile world only accentuates our insecurity.”

Medact