Healthcare professionals, conflict prevention, and peacebuilding: towards peace through health?

Health workers are not only victims of armed conflict (although, all-too-often they are), but also have the potential to play important roles in preventing conflict, mitigating its effects, and building peace. Covering both theory and practice, the chapter examines the potential for health professionals to be agents for peace. Their ability to do so has been seen as deriving from a number of factors, including their ability to provide expert opinion on the damaging public health consequences of armed violence; the status of health as a ‘superordinate goal’ around which common ground can be found; and norms of medical neutrality which, in some circumstances at least, enable health professionals to play mediating roles.

The chapter begins by examining the development of thinking over recent decades about how to prevent conflict and restore peace where violence has broken out. It then goes on to examine the specific roles that have been identified for (and in some cases fulfilled by) healthcare professionals in this before looking ahead to consider the ways in which these ideas of ‘Peace through Health’ are challenged by social and political trends, in particular the undermining of medical neutrality and a more general rise in distrust of medical and other scientific professionals. The chapter concludes by pointing to some of the responses that have been suggested for these challenges, including making Peace through Health-relevant skills a core part of medical education, promoting best practice and successful initiatives, and working within professional associations to oppose war.