Medact conference highlights peace issues

Medical staff, arms control experts, peacebuilders and front-line humanitarian workers participated at Medact’s ‘Health Through Peace’ conference

Medical staff, arms control experts, peacebuilders and front-line humanitarian workers were among participants at Medact’s ‘Health Through Peace’ conference held at Friends House on 13 and 14 November.

Several hundred people heard the opening lecture from Paul Rogers, of the Bradford School of Peace Studies and the Oxford Research Group. He spoke about ‘War, violence and conflict: global trends 1945-2015’. Paul focused on the period between 1945 and 2045, which he referred to as ‘the century on the edge’. He questioned whether, two-thirds of the way through this ‘century’, cold war lessons have been learned and sufficient wisdom gained ‘to learn to live within our worldwide limits’.

Conference and workshop sessions covered a broad range of topics. Many of these were particularly timely, such as the session on ‘New weapons and remote warfare’ and that on ‘Supporting refugees in the UK’.

Participants were also offered sessions on ‘Unpicking nuclear deterrence theory’, ‘Climate change and conflict’, and ‘Assessing the health impacts of war and conflict’, among other topics.

The Health Through Peace Lecture was delivered by activist and former UK climate envoy John Ashton and former South African MP Andrew Feinstein. They discussed the state of global security, with a particular focus on how the health community can respond to war, militarisation and ecological collapse.

Frank Boulton, one of the organisers, said: ‘The central point is that in an ever increasingly uncertain world, fuelled by climate change, resource depletion, widening poverty gap, increasing   population and much wider com-munications through the internet and social media (to which the educated but under-employed developing societies are particularly prone), war, including nuclear war, will become more likely and destructive.’

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