Global Courant 2023-04-21 12:21:21
Medical teams responding to health crises in armed conflict facing severe context-specific constraints often undermining their core tasks. A recent example of this is the 2023 earthquakes in northwestern Syria and Turkey.
The Syrian regime under President Bashir al-Assad has reportedly shown this lack of respect for international humanitarian law. This severely restricts acceptance and access from World Health Organization-classified emergency medical teams to disaster-stricken communities.
In such highly interdependent worlds, emergency medical teams cannot deliver based on individual effort alone. Other major nodes in the network must be able to establish the conditions necessary for their success.
Instrumentalizing medical aid
Over the past two decades, competition between great powers has reemerged. This has resulted in a clear increase in the number ideological, political and military competition between superpower states. This match has radically changed the context for medical teams responding to health crises in armed conflict.
When disaster strikes the fault lines, it is not surprising that one or more of these superpower competitors and their proxies seek to use international emergency medical assistance to pursue competitive advantage.
Creating the right conditions for international medical teams to successfully respond to health crises in armed conflict requires consensus. But in hyper-competitive contexts, UN member states find it increasingly difficult to reach the necessary consensus.
Reevaluate service models
It is clear that international humanitarian organizations need to get around much better avoidable failures in this changing reality. However, this requires a fundamental re-evaluation of the service models for providing emergency medical assistance in armed conflict.
The dominant models were never designed to achieve the desired results in worlds inhabited by major competitors who have strategic preferences for inhuman consequences. The earthquakes between Turkey and Syria in 2023 are a horrible demonstration of this.
What we desperately need right now new models that fit into worlds like Libya, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen. This does not only require innovation. It also requires a turn in strategic thinking.
In such wildly uncertain worlds, international humanitarian health workers must emphasize pattern recognition over formal plans. If they don’t, they will be unable to adapt to the constantly changing reality to the ground.
Inflection point
International emergency medical aid has reached a turning point. There is a clear and current need for it rethink the structures with which key stakeholders in the international humanitarian health ecosystem interact.
Such a radical reinvention could result in the successful emergency medical care of vulnerable communities damaged by man-made and natural disasters amid armed conflict.
International humanitarian health organizations must unlock the full potential of emergency medical assistance.
To do this, they cannot simply hire consultants to design new armed conflict service models. They will need to deepen collaboration with other key stakeholders to identify, understand and mitigate the issues co-innovation and adoption chain risks that undermine such innovations.
Inevitably, these ecosystem disruptors will encounter stakeholders who resist change out of a desire to protect their stocks and maintain their status. Transformational Leadership will be necessary to overcome such self-serving opposition in a fair and deliberate manner.
This article presents the opinion of the author and not necessarily that of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) or the editors of The loopwhere it previously appeared.
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