How can health be more effective in peace works in Turkey: introducing peace through health

ABSTRACT

Peace through Health (PtH), developed in practice in the 1980s and conceptualized soon after by international institutions and scholars, has become a field focusing on the unique role of health in making, building and promoting peace. PtH advocates that health professionals, the actors of PtH, should play an active role in any peace process and should, therefore, be trained accordingly. There is, however, no agreed and established training which addresses PtH for health professionals. It is because each particular type of violence, which is the opposite of peace in the Galtungian sense, and the conditions and the geography in which it takes place have different characteristics. This paper attempts to examine the theoretical and practical aspects of PtH in Turkey and to lead the development of systematic training for PtH in the country. Considering that an advanced health system in the country stands out in the international arena, it is necessary to develop interdisciplinary modules as a part of this for the Turkish tertiary curricula.

KEYWORDS:

• Peace through health
• peace
• violence
• tertiary curriculum
• Turkey

Acknowledgment

I thank my students Aycan Yildiz, Feyza Diri, Nisa Seker, and Zeynep Pilan in the Health Law Programme for their helpful suggestions on the earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sezai Caglayan

Dr Sezai Caglayan is an assistant professor at the AFB Law Faculty of Ondokuz Mayis University in Samsun, Turkey. His research focuses on international law, human rights, and humanitarian law in general, and rules of engagement, international peace and security, environmental justice, waste trade, the links between health and law, and international responses to major health crises in particular. His works reflect an interdisciplinary approach, benefiting scholarships across law, international relations, sociology, and public health. He spent a year as a research fellow at Sheffield University Law School in the UK between 2021-2022. His most recent work is a book chapter, The Waste Trade as a Tool of Colonialism in Our Age: A Sociolegal Analysis for Türkiye in Plastic Waste Trade: A New Colonialist Means of Pollution Transfer (Springer Nature, 2024), co-authored with Firdevs Yuzbasi.