King's College London

War has catastrophic effects on individual human, national, and global security. This is most pronounced on human physical, mental, and social health. This theme covers research and policymaking based on the primary impact of conflict and war on health and health outcomes, the secondary impacts on health systems and services, and the wider tertiary impacts of war on society and their effect on the social determinants of health.

With partners, we consider how the nature of war and the changing character of war influences the use of violence as a tool in international relations. We seek to place threats to health within balance of investment decisions about mitigation of threats to national and international security. We argue that a nation’s health system enterprise is an element of critical national infrastructure and an instrument of national resilience.

We take a holistic public health, health systems, and clinical services approach to understanding how practitioners and communities mobilise to meet the health needs of conflict and crisis affected populations. We look at the political economy of health services and the interaction between governments, the UN system, markets and money. We examine civil-military relations, both as a holistic, whole system enterprise and as a risk to humanitarian principles.

The theme includes projects with regional partners in Ukraine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and other countries in Africa and South America.

Key resources:

UKRI Research for Health in Conflict (MENA) archive website:

https://r4hc-mena.org/ This website hosts our outputs from the UKRI funded programme to build research and policy capacity in conflict affected areas, focusing on health, political economy of health, and complex non-communicable diseases such as mental health and cancer, and facilitate more effective translation of research into policy.

NIHR Research for Health Systems Strengthening in Syria

https://r4hsss.org/ This website hosts our outputs from the UKRI funded programme to the capture the experience of health systems in north west Syria (Idlib area) and develop plans for the health system in northern Syria for the early recovery phase.