Rendering the suffering of the marginalized visible has been an important aspect of feminist sociological studies of health, illness and medicine, with the subjective experience of those without access to institutional power being at the forefront of the research. This volume analyzes the links between the suffering caused by the intentional violence of war and the unintentional suffering engendered by modern medicinal processes. By establishing a fitting tribute to the academic and campaigning work of Meg Stacey, Global Perspectives on War, Gender and Health responds to her challenge of ’why medical sociology had not yet turned its gaze upon the health consequences of war’. A selection of international case studies are used to create a volume of significant interest to sociologists and those working in the fields of anthropology, social policy, social work, peace, war and security studies, and international development.

Rendering the suffering of the marginalized visible has been an important aspect of feminist sociological studies of health, illness and medicine, with the subjective experience of those without access to institutional power being at the forefront of the research. This volume analyzes the links between the suffering caused by the intentional violence of war and the unintentional suffering engendered by modern medicinal processes. By establishing a fitting tribute to the academic and campaigning work of Meg Stacey, Global Perspectives on War, Gender and Health responds to her challenge of ’why medical sociology had not yet turned its gaze upon the health consequences of war’. A selection of international case studies are used to create a volume of significant interest to sociologists and those working in the fields of anthropology, social policy, social work, peace, war and security studies, and international development.

The past decade has witnessed a significant increase in the construction of health as a security issue by national governments and multilateral organizations. This book provides the first critical, feminist analysis of the flesh-and-blood impacts of the securitization of health on different bodies, while broadening the scope of what we understand as global health security. It looks at how feminist perspectives on health and security can lead to different questions about health and in/security, problematizing some of the ‘common sense’ assumptions that underlie much of the discourse in this area. It considers the norms, ideologies, and vested interests that frame specific ‘threats’ to health and policy responses, while exposing how the current governance of the global economy shapes new threats to health. Some chapters focus on conflict, war and complex emergencies, while others move from a ‘high political’ focus to the domain of subtler and often insidious structural violence, illuminating the impacts of hegemonic masculinities and the neoliberal governance of the global economy on health and life chances. Highlighting the critical intersections across health, gender and security, this book is an important contribution to scholarship on health and security, global health, public health and gender studies.

Beyond the metaphorical use of healthy society as a normative goal of Peace Research, there is little engagement in contemporary Peace Research with questions of global health. Simultaneously, critical feminist approaches to the intersections of different forms of violence and health are rare in Global Health literature. Bringing together feminist Peace Research and Global Health scholarships, this edited book aims to enrich both scholarly traditions. On the one hand, the book provides perspectives from feminist Peace Research that help us to understand and analyse different forms of violence in the gendered realm of global health. On the other hand, the variety of empirical cases analysed in the chapters widens the horizons of Peace Research, in its understanding of what it means to study violence, peace, and justice in everyday lives. The themes dealt in the chapters of the book vary from questions of reproductive health, to non-communicable (e.g. breast cancer) and communicable diseases (e.g. HIV/AIDS), war-time sexual violence, mental health, therapeutic justice, domestic violence, and ageing and dementia. This text will help students and researchers alike navigate Global Health through a feminist lens.

Inspired by a conference held at Northeastern University on the topic of Women, War, and Violence, editors Robin M. Chandler, Lihua Wang, and Linda K. Fuller bring together research and real-life stories from twenty-one international contributors who document gender involvement from victims to valiant in wartime and activism.