The War Machine and Global Health [Hardcover]

In the contemporary world, war rivals infectious disease as a global cause of morbidity and mortality. Since the end of World War II, there have been at least 160 wars around the world with as many as 25 million (and probably many more) people killed, most of them civilians. Directly or indirectly, war touches the lives of most people on the planet, often with lasting and costly impact. Framed by the holistic and ethnographically grounded theoretical perspective of critical medical anthropology, and more broadly by the political economy of health, this book of essays by leading medical anthropologists and other health social scientists carefully examines the global effects of war, the war industry, and the international weapons trade on human health and well-being. Further, this book goes beyond offering a lively and readable account of a pressing health concern by critically analyzing the political and economic forces driving the war machine to inflict ever-increasing levels of social suffering and loss of life.Merrill Singeris currently senior research scientist at the Center of Health, Intervention and Prevention and professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Connecticut. He also is a research affiliate of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (CIRA) at Yale University.G. Derrick Hodgeis a medical anthropologist and political economist who currently teaches at the University of Missouri Kansas City. He is also an adjunct professor of medical anthropology to graduate students at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

This is anthropology for the upcoming century. Deeply relevant, morally engaged, theoretically astute, ethnographically rich. The authors take us on a global journey into the intersections of war and its devastating effects on health  the health of people, of politics, and of our tomorrows. Carolyn Nordstrom, University of Notre Dame

The editors and contributors present comprehensils