Principal speaker
Sara Davies
Griffith Asia Institute - Reserach Seminar
‘The Health Insecurity Nexus:The Relationship between Armed Conflict, Governance and Health in Southeast Asia’
Presented by: Dr Sara Davies, Senior Lecturer, School of Government and International Relations, Griffith University.
Over the past decade, there have been increased attempts to understand the contributing factors to the relationship between healthy populations (i.e. populations that have long life expectancy from birth), the prevention of conflict, and governance regimes that enable ‘healthy nations’ to survive and thrive. Generally, the findings have pointed to a ‘health insecurity nexus’ that occurs across three stages. First, post-conflict countries that do not prioritize health system strengthening will have low life expectancy and high disease burden for infectious diseases that will continue into the next generation. Breaking the health insecurity status of individuals, and their children, is vital for the achievement of political stability. If unaddressed, the risk of the second stage arrives, where increased levels of the population’s vulnerability to infectious disease outbreaks will increase societal-political tensions, and in turn affect the capacity to govern. At the third stage, the conflict spiral becomes almost inevitable, particularly when countries are autocratic regimes, combined with a history of prior conflict and poor investment in health care comparative to expenditure on the military. The third stage evolution of the health-insecurity nexus sees a perfect storm between neglect of a whole population’s health with regime type, public health expenditure on health and military goods, and conflict. Such studies are laudable for their macro approach and quantitative analysis. However, this article is interested in examining what insights the individual stories of post-conflict countries – in a regional setting – may provide to challenge or indeed extend the findings advanced so far in the literature on the relationship between war, health and governance. In this article I examine what the three-stage explanation of ‘health insecurity’ nexus may illuminate in the ASEAN member states context, which has a mix of civil conflict, post- conflict, and peacetime experiences.
Sara Davies is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Government and International Relations, Griffith University. She is also Program Convenor of the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities Research Program, Asia Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, University of Queensland. Sara’s research interests are in global health governance, international refugee law and the responsibility to protect.
-Thursday 24 October 2013
- N72, Meeting Room -1.18
- Nathan campus
- 12.30 – 1:50pm
A light lunch will be provided.
To RSVP, please contact Meegan Thorly on (07) 3735 5322 or m.thorly@griffith.edu.au by 5.00pm Monday 21 October 2013.
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RSVP on or before Monday 21 October 2013 , by email m.thorley@griffith.edu.au , or by phone 37355322