War ruptures, rends and remakes ecologies both on and off the battlefields. From heavy metals in munitions that promote antimicrobial resistance, the destruction of healthcare and sanitation infrastructures, biodiversity loss and forced displacement, war has profound consequences both clinically and socially. Changing epidemiological landscapes, infrastructural destruction and violent upheavals fracture social and ecological relations simultaneously—uprooting communities, intensifying infection risk and exposure, and reconfiguring more-than-human relations in ways that are ongoing and unpredictable.
This conference: War, Medicine and Resistance brings together researchers, clinicians, and practitioners to examine how contemporary conflicts transform bodies, environments, health systems, and microbial worlds. Across panels, roundtables and workshops, the conference traces the entangled ecologies of war—from toxic landscapes and collapsing infrastructures to shifting epidemiological patterns, displacement, reproductive health, and antimicrobial resistance.
We aim to illuminate how conflicts rework and are inscribed in landscapes, bodies, and multispecies relations: Heavy metals, damaged water systems, disrupted care infrastructures, forced migration and the scarcity of medicines create conditions in which infections evolve, vulnerabilities deepen, and communities are remade. Understanding these transformations requires perspectives that exceed disciplinary boundaries: bringing together clinical, environmental and social expertise empirically, methodologically, theoretically and as fellow researchers.
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Three key thematic threads shape the programme:
These sessions investigate how war reshapes landscapes, bodies and multispecies relations. Contributors explore toxicity, antimicrobial resistance, biodiversity loss, changing patterns of infection, and the lived consequences of displacement and infrastructural collapse. Together, these papers illuminate how conflict alters ecological and microbiological relations in ways that escape conventional medical or humanitarian frames, and what it means to respond collectively to these challenges.
This session addresses the disproportionate and often obscured impacts of conflict on women and AFAB people. From sexual and gender-based violence to disruptions to reproductive, maternal and sexual health care, the panel foregrounds the biological, social and political dimensions of women’s health in conflict and displacement. These contributions demonstrate that women’s health is fundamental to understanding the broader entanglements between war, medicine, and resistance—not a peripheral concern.
To close the academic aspect of the conference we turn to aftermaths. If war transforms ecologies, the aftermath asks what futures can be cultivated from these ruins. This roundtable considers how communities, infrastructures, ecosystems and microbiomes persist and adapt beyond conflict. Participants offer empirically grounded recommendations, political arguments, speculative orientations and calls to action that speak to building more just, restorative and care-centred futures.
Call Closes: 25 February 2026
The conference will be hybrid: held primarily in person, with the possibility of an online session
We encourage all presenters to attend in person if possible.
If you would like to attend but cannot due to financial constraints or lack of institutional funding please indicate this in your application and we will do our best to accommodate you.
This session aims to outline ‘war ecology’ through an empirical and multidisciplinary perspective. We aim to illuminate how conflicts rework and are inscribed in landscapes, bodies, and multispecies relations—and how these transformations exceed conventional medical, humanitarian, or geopolitical frames. In doing so, we ask how we might form coalitions better placed to understand, respond to and intervene in conflict so that we might protect both human and more-than-human life.
Example contributions might:
War reshapes bodies, social worlds, and health systems in ways that have distinct and often disproportionate consequences for women* and AFAB people. Sexual and gender-based violence is frequently mobilised as a deliberate technology of warfare—producing trauma, stigma, displacement, and long-term health needs that can outlast the conflict itself. Women also navigate the amplified risks and vulnerabilities of pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and reproductive health in environments where infrastructures are collapsing, medicines are scarce, and mobility is forced and/or constrained. This ‘In-Focus’ session invites contributions that explore the biological, social and political intersections of conflict and women’s health writ broadly. We welcome work that names, traces and responds to the specificities of conflict and reproductive health in hope that together these generate a clearer understanding of the challenge and enable appropriate interventions. Demonstrating that women’s health is not a peripheral concern but central to understanding the entanglements of war, medicine, and resistance
We particularly encourage submissions that:
investigate the aftermaths of war on women’s bodies, relationships, and possibilities for healing
In the aftermath of conflict, what comes next? If war ecologies reveal the profound entanglement of bodies, environments, infrastructures, and histories, then the aftermath asks us to consider how we respond to those entanglements with care, responsibility, and imagination. This session turns to the lives that persist in the ruins—human, microbial, ecological—and to the work necessary to create an aftermath which is oriented towards a more just, peaceful, care-ful future. We invite calls to action, empirically grounded recommendations, political arguments, speculative works and historical reflections.
Registration open:
There are no attendance fees associated with this conference.
Dr. Signe Svallfors is Associate Professor in Sociology with the Department of Sociology and Demography Unit at Stockholm University. Their research focuses on the intersection of violence, social inequality, and health dynamics, with an emphasis on reproductive rights and gender-based violence in Latin America. Dr. Svallfors is the Principal Investigator of the SeRO project, investigating how sexual and reproductive health is affected by local violent crime in Mexico, funded by the European Research Council.
Tuomas Aro is a specialist in internal medicine and an infectious diseases trainee at Helsinki University Hospital, Finland. He is a PhD candidate, with research focused on antimicrobial resistance among refugees and asylum seekers.
Trained in medicine and anthropology, I work at the intersections of global health, history of medicine and political anthropology. My scholarship focuses on the human and environmental manifestations of decades of conflict and military interventions in Iraq and the broader Middle East. My first book,
On the final day of the conference, 13th of May from 14:00 - 16:30, we will host a methods workshop in entitled: Researching War Ecologies: Interdisciplinary Methods and Collaboration. This workshop will feature a presentation by keynote speaker Signe Svallfors on methodological innovations for studying conflict and health as well as practical discussions aimed at those looking to conduct their own work in this area. All career stages and disciplines are welcome.