About Peace Through Health

What is Peace Through Health?

An emerging academic discipline to study how health interventions in actual and potential war zones may contribute to peace.

Often low-key and unadvertised, peace through health initiatives have taken many forms such as humanitarian ceasefire, the use of health expertise to restrict weapons and war strategies, and the combining of individual and social healing in war zones.

History of Peace Through Health Initiative

In 1991 following the Gulf war against Iraq an International Study Team, including several people from McMaster University visited Iraq and gave an early report of the impact of war and sanctions on the Iraqi population.

When the first of the wars in the Balkans broke out, concerned people from both the Centre for Peace Studies and the then Centre for International Health came together to consider how we might contribute to ameliorate an increasingly terrible situation.

From there we gradually formulated the idea of peace through health.  We wished to carry out field projects simultaneously with reflecting on and analyzing what we were doing, and to evaluate it when possible. We began work on an epidemiologic project on the physical and mental health of children in the occupied territory of Gaza, an epidemiologic study of child mental health in Sri Lanka, and an intervention on mental health and peacebuilding for war-affected children in Croatia. The Sri Lankan work evolved into an unusual and wonderful intervention - the Butterfly Garden - a healing garden where children from several sides of ethnic divides come together to grow things, make things, sing and dance and tell stories.

The Croatian work was evaluated in a controlled trial and showed evidence of effectiveness in both mental health and in reducing ethnic hatred. Current PtH projects at McMaster University include peacebuilding in Afghanistan.

The Population Health Institute has now become the "health leg" of peace-through-health. This association gave birth to the international conference held in 2001.

Ten Peace Through Health Approaches  

  1. Health-related superordinate goals
    A superordinate goal is one that transcends the separate goals of parties to a conflict and that can best be achieved when the parties join efforts, e.g. ceasefire for immunization.
  2. Evocation and extension of altruism
    When health care is extended to out-groups, we are sometimes able to resist the objectification and demonization that usually accompany war, e.g. Palestinian-Israeli health service partnerships.
  3. Discovery and dissemination of facts
    Health professionals are often in the best position to discover and make known the accurate information that is essential to a proper assessment of the situation and to counter propaganda, e.g. health in Iraq after Gulf War.
  4. Redefinition of the situation
    War can be portrayed as a game, a test of manhood, a competition of civilizations, a cosmic contest of good and evil. Health workers can promote different understandings of war, e.g. nuclear weapons as a public health problem.
  5. Healing of trauma
    Injuries caused by war can slow down a society's recovery.  Health workers are at home in this healing role, but they may be even more effective if they can utilize methods of trauma-healing that are linked to social processes of reconciliation and peace building, e.g. Butterfly Gardens in Sri Lanka.
  6. Contribution to civic identity
    In cases where societies have been divided by identity conflicts, people who have an adequate and equitable health care system are strengthened in their sense of belonging to the society or the state that has provided it for them. They are less apt to join groups with competing claims on their identity, e.g. WHO work in Croatia.
  7. Contribution to human security
    An adequate and equitable health care system, which addresses people's basic needs, gives them an essential form of security. Lack of such security may lead to violence or war to achieve it.
  8. Diplomacy, mediation and conflict transformation
    If health workers develop skills in diplomacy, mediation and conflict resolution they will sometimes have unique opportunities to use these, e.g. Peacebuilding in Afghanistan.
  9. Solidarity and support
    All PtH mechanisms involve solidarity and support for victims of war. But some include the direct accompaniment of victims or potential victims by health workers, as well as direct advocacy, e.g. Israeli Physicians for Humans Rights.
  10. Dissent and non-cooperation
    When health workers are called on to collaborate in unjust wars or preparations for such wars, or in the development of inhumane policies or weapons of war, they can refuse to do so. They will have the support not only of a wide body of international law but also of declarations directed specifically at health workers.