Risk Management and Healthcare Policy (Dec 2024)
Global Health and Peace: The Elusive Path with a Focus on Palestine, Ukraine, and Venezuela
Abstract
Mohammed Alkhaldi,1– 4 Zeana Hamdonah,5 Lyne El Khatib6 1Department of Public Health, Canadian University Dubai, Dubai, United Arab Emirates; 2Faculty of Medicine, School of Physical and Occupational Therapy, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada; 3Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK; 4The Global Health Network (TGHN), Regional Network of the Middle East and North Africa, Dubai, United Arab Emirates; 5Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, ONT, Canada; 6Department of Health Management and Policy, Faculty of Health Sciences, American University of Beirut, Beirut, LebanonCorrespondence: Mohammed Alkhaldi, Email [email protected]: The interrelationality of health and peace is complex, multifactorial, and imbued with political and economic challenges. Peace and health outcomes reflect shared fundamental values related to the achievement of a balanced holistic condition on the individual and collective level. This causal relationship between social inequity and health requires special attention to be paid to the impact of political instability and structural violence on undermining health systems in conflict zones. The mutual dependency between peace and health means that peace cannot be achieved without the existence of physical, mental, social, and spiritual health, and holistic health cannot be sustained under violent conditions. The interrelationality of peace and health as mutual conditions shapes our understanding of global solidarity and advocacy in relation to health diplomacy and peace promotion if addressed equally across all conflict zones This commentary analyzes the unique interdisciplinary contextual factors that contribute to or undermine the realization of global health and peace in three active conflict zones: Palestine, Ukraine, and Venezuela. Contextual analysis, review of the evidence, and synthesis of the authors’ perspectives were used. The health-peace nexus remains a theoretical approach and lacks real application in most settings under crisis. Peace is a multifaceted phenomenon that necessitates the participation, dedication, and action of all sectors and stakeholders in the global societies, including health policymakers, scientists, professionals, and people. Both the “right to health” and the “right to peace” even at the minimum remains unfulfilled, particually in Palestine, and can be realized through two trajectories: (1) honest, responsible, and fair accountability, transparency, and political commitment empowered by reliable global health diplomacy for maintaining peace, eliminating the roots of injustice, and protecting health systems, and (2) equitable and real implementation of peace-health approaches, policies and actions driven by monitroing mechanims that promote health, well-being, health security and equity for all nations under conflicts.Plain Language Summary: Countries under conflict are facing multiple, (re)emerging and complex crises aggravated by increasing structural social, political, and economic pressures and inequities that mainly impact people’s health and health systems. Global health and politics integration is key for promoting health through building reliable and lasting peace in these countries.The existing global health governance and diplomacy structures of peacebuilding for health are powerless, ineffective, and still polarized, thus global health actors up for failure when it comes to addressing the root causes of the crisis and building/maintaining a reliable and lasting peace in countires under conflict.Crises including political pressures, historic suffering due to coloniality, protracted conflicts, lack of firm enforcement of international laws, including diplomatic, humanitarian, and human rights laws, hypocritical standards of intervention, health inequity and injustice, and absence of impactful and unfied global rights-based advocacy movements from civic, academic, labour, and professional societies, all impede the creation of peaceful societies that promote health and vice versa.Palestine, Ukraine, and Venezuela reflect diverse contexts where clear major disparities are present in terms of global solidarity and advocacy, levels and forms of interventions, global attention, magnitude of losses, and actors’ willingness to promote the health-peace approach and to change realities.Continued impunity, partiality, and injustice undermine health-peace promotion and scale up local and global health disruptions, and the common challenges of suboptimal health status should be sufficiently handled based on equal rights, equity, accountability, and transparency regardless of variations in geography, ethnicity, region, political context.Keywords: global health, peace-health nexus, Palestine, Ukraine, Venezuela
