According to the dominant position in the just war tradition from Augustine to Anscombe and beyond, there is no ‘‘moral equality of combatants.’’ That is, on the traditional view the combatants participating in a justified war may kill their enemy combatants participating in an unjustified war—but not vice versa (barring certain qualifications). I shall argue here, however, that in the large nu...

BACKGROUND: Applied epidemiologists are increasingly working in areas of insecurity and active conflict to define the health risks, suggest feasible means to reduce these risks and, monitor the capacity and reconstruction of the public health system. In 2001, The Carter Center and the United States Institute for Peace sponsored a conference within which "Violence and Health" was discussed and a...

This commentary examines the incursion on the neutrality of medical personnel now taking place as part of the human rights crises in Bahrain and Syria, and the ethical dilemmas which these incursions place not only in front of physicians practicing in those nations, but in front of the international community as a whole.In Bahrain, physicians have recently received harsh prison terms, apparentl...

The discourse of human rights in armed conflict situations is well adapted to respond to violence and violation, invoking internationally agreed principles of civil and political rights. However, in areas where the subject or domain of rights discourse is contested or controversial, human rights advocates appear less prepared to promote and defend such rights. Sexuality is one such domain. This...

I was disappointed and saddened by the carelessness of the title ‘Going to war does not have to hurt’ in the June issue of the Journal (Hacker Hughes et al, 2005). One does not even have to mention the considerable number of British casualties in Iraq to realise that this headline is completely ill thought out and a particularly misplaced euphemism that fails to appreciate that war in modern ti...

From Partition to the present day, India has displayed an ability to sustain democratic forms of government and politics. There have been no military bids for power and even Mrs. Gandhi’s months of emergency rule, which many thought perilously close to a dictatorship, was ended by the electors’ verdict in 1977. Despite phases of acute domestic strain and communal violence, the assassination of ...

The term resilience has dominated the discourse among health systems researchers since 2014 and the onset of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. There is wide consensus that the global community has to help build more resilient health systems. But do we really know what resilience means, and do we all have the same vision of resilience? The present paper presents a new conceptual framework on go...

Kabul and Monrovia, the respective capitals of Afghanistan and Liberia, have recently emerged from long-lasting armed conflicts. In both cities, a large number of organisations took part in emergency water supply provision and later in the rehabilitation of water systems. Based on field research, this paper establishes a parallel between the operations carried out in the two settings, highlight...

T he 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) was the first international treaty that enjoins nations to outlaw an entire class of weapons of mass destruction. The BWC’s Article I bans the development, production, stockpiling, or other acquisition of “microbial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin or method of production, of types and in quantities that have no ...