Researching the Impact of Attacks on Healthcare (RIAH)

I have two primary objectives for my time at Brocher: (1) arrange 10-15 meetings with individuals or organisations with topical relevance to my areas of interest (attacks on healthcare and applied ethics), particularly to promote uptake of our research; (2) intensive research and writing about RIAH synthetic findings. These objectives will enhance my primary outcome, to complete one journal article while in residence at Brocher.

My secondary goal, as time permits, is to advance my next research project (on everyday ethical dilemmas of crisis response) by establishing stronger research networks with relevant communities in Geneva. Specifically, I will use my meetings with humanitarian actors to explore these topics further, enhancing opportunities for collaboration and strengthening a future grant proposal application.

Objective 1: I envision setting up targeted meetings with Geneva-based humanitarian actors, such as the ICRC, particularly the High-level panel on IHL, and UN agencies such as the OHCHR, OCHA, and the WHO. I also plan to meet with NGOs such as MSF and Geneva Call, among others, and with academics at UNIGE (Karl Blanchet) and the Graduate Institute/IHEID (eg Gilles Carbonnier, Vinh Kim Nguyen, Davide Rodogno and those at the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding). I plan to liaise with my colleague Christina Wille, who has extensive networks in Geneva among policy actors interested in the topic of attacks on healthcare, in order to set up targeted meetings to share our RIAH findings and promote uptake of our research. These meetings will contribute to my writing and analysis, as well as enhancing current and future potential research collaborations.

Objective 2: I plan to focus the majority of my time on writing a synthetic article about our RIAH findings, focused specifically on how conflict dynamics and their influence on attacks on healthcare. Our findings illustrate that some types of attacks characterise certain types of conflict (eg the use of air-based attacks on health in wars in Ukraine and Yemen, targeted killing of personnel in Syria, forced closures of facilities in Afghanistan, looting and threats in Central African Republic), but we understand less about these drivers of these types of attack as part of the strategic logics of perpetrators. I plan to do preparatory reading and research prior to the residency so that I can focus my time at Brocher on drafting and completing an article analysing these dynamics and drivers.