Acknowledgments

The American Academy’s project on Rethinking the Humanitarian Health Response to Violent Conflict brings together legal and security experts, health professionals, leaders of humanitarian organizations, policy-makers, artists, and representatives of victimized communities to confront the current crisis in humanitarian protection and the provision of health services in areas plagued by violent conflict. The project is based on the premise that new approaches are best derived from a deeper, transdisciplinary understanding of the changing political, military, legal, and health dimensions that are dramatically redefining humanitarian challenges throughout the world. The initiative’s overarching goals include questioning, where necessary, long-standing assumptions about how to meet the needs of populations and devising new strategies for the effective provision of humanitarian health responses. To ensure the relevance of its work in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, the project adopted a pragmatic approach to the changing context for meeting humanitarian needs by examining underlying issues that undermine effective humanitarian responses, including a lack of global cooperation on pandemic preparedness and response.

This publication, Peace Operations at the Intersection of Health Emergencies and Violent Conflict: Lessons from the 2018–2020 DRC Ebola Crisis, by Dirk Druet (McGill University), reflects the project’s examination of the intersection of pandemics and peace operations. The paper is based on extensive desk research as well as a series of interviews with key participants in the response to the Ebola crisis. We would like to express our gratitude to the participants in these interviews, as well as the group of scholars, representatives of international organizations, and humanitarian practitioners who joined us for a workshop on pandemics, peace operations, and public health responses in October 2021. We are deeply appreciative of their comments on the paper and of the broader set of ideas they shared on preparing integrated missions to operate in pandemic contexts in conflict. We also thank Emily K. M. Scott for serving as a rapporteur during this session.

As cochairs of the project, we thank our advisory group for their guidance on both the wider initiative and the specific research on peace operations. We also extend our thanks to many experts—at humanitarian organizations, at universities and think tanks, at the United Nations, and elsewhere—who have encouraged our work during a very challenging period for all researchers. In addition, we are grateful to the team at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, including Kathryn Moffat, Islam Qasem, Melissa Chan, Francesca Giovannini, Jen Smith, Kathleen Torgesen, Phyllis Bendell, Scott Raymond, Heather M. Struntz, and Peter Walton.

Finally, we express our gratitude to Louise Henry Bryson and John E. Bryson and to the Malcolm Weiner Foundation for their generous support for the Rethinking the Humanitarian Health Response to Violent Conflict project.

Jennifer M. Welsh
McGill University
Cochair, Rethinking the Humanitarian Health Response to Violent Conflict project

Paul H. Wise
Stanford University
Cochair, Rethinking the Humanitarian Health Response to Violent Conflict project

Jaime Sepulveda
University of California, San Francisco
Cochair, Rethinking the Humanitarian Health Response to Violent Conflict project