ABSTRACT
Within a concept of human security defined as human wellbeing, there are no more cogent or comprehensive indicators of the security of a society than health and healthcare. Peace researchers have often used medicine and illness as metaphors in the study of war and armed conflict. This article, however, in bringing the issue of health itself into the very centre of the human security discourse, makes a transformative conceptual shift that illuminates the argument that human security is incompatible with and cannot be achieved within a system of militarized state security, obscured by the conceptual cloak of ‘national security’. Health, as the article demonstrates, shows more clearly than any other single example the links between gender as a power determinant, militarism as patriarchal power maintenance and human insecurity as the fundamental condition of deprivation – like sexual violence – inevitably worsened by war and armed conflict.
