The goals of health and human security are fundamentally valued in all societies, yet the breadth of their interconnections are not properly understood. This volume explores the evolving relationship between health and security in today's interdependent world, and offers policy guidelines for global health action.

This volume underscores three basic principles. First, recent developments in the changing security landscape present enormous challenges for human security and global health. Second, although the connections between health and security are long-standing, the current context of new conflicts, pervasive poverty, and accelerating global flows has brought the fields closer together. Finally, a human security approach dependent upon individual and collective action can identify new strategies for meeting the goals of global health and security.

The distinguished contributions to this volume were commissioned by Harvard University's Global Equity Initiative, a research unit supporting the work of the International Commission on Human Security.

Since the late 1980s the international relief community has seen its resources and personnel stressed beyond capacity by humanitarian crises--large-scale, man-made catastrophes such as the conflicts in Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya, Zaire, and elsewhere. Waged within collapsing states, political and ethnic strife targets civilians, causes mass population dislocation and widespread human rights abuses, and impedes the efforts of relief organizations to respond effectively. Covering topics ranging from emergency public health measures to the psychological trauma of relief workers, this volume presents both a seasoned assessment of current practice and proposals for improving operational efforts in the future. The discussion also raises important questions relating to the definition and direction of the overall humanitarian mission.

Wars always harm civilians. How wars are waged—with what means and methods, and with what underlying animus—has great impact on civilian suffering and social memory. Across time frames and cultures, this book examines the various distinct features of anti- and post-colonial wars, the two World Wars, and recent wars of the 21st century in terms of their disruption of everyday life and their enduring distortion of social ecosystems. With a lens trained on how civilians and soldiers remember the experience of armed conflict, Legacies of War challenges narrow conceptions of the cost of war.

Jennifer Leaning, a humanitarian and human rights analyst, draws on her diverse experience to describe both the long- and short-term consequences of wars waged in the midst of—or even against—civilian populations. The book illuminates a breakdown of distinction between home front and battlefront and the resulting erosion of civilian protection with the rise of intrastate war and policies of war-at-a-distance. Enlisting seasoned contributors for a wide-ranging set of essays, the book identifies significant trends in the conduct of war, and traces how these trends are later rendered in individual and social rituals of interpretation, commemoration, expiation, or avoidance.