Health and human security: Core to national and global stability
In a world of intersecting crises, health must be treated as critical infrastructure and a pillar of national security – protecting health systems is a strategic imperative for national resilience
Esperanza Martinez, professor of practice, Australian National University, and commissioner, The Lancet Commission on Health, Conflict and Forced Displacement
H istorically, health has security. Covid-19 shattered that illusion. The pandemic closed borders, disrupted economies, strained defence forces and exposed governance limits across every region. It proved decisively that health challenges are not isolated – they are systemic and profoundly strategic. To place health in its rightful context, we must turn to the broader concept of human security. This framing situates health within the multiple dimensions that shape people’s safety, dignity and resilience – including economic, food, environmental, personal, and community and political security. In this view, health is not an isolated silo but part of an interdependent web of risks and protections. Importantly, this is not about been treated as a sectoral concern – important, but peripheral to the machinery of national and global securitising health. Rather, it is about ensuring that health is understood as a foundation of societal stability – and, by extension, a core national interest. This framing matters because it enables better engagement across sectors. It allows health to be
discussed in the same strategic space as defence, foreign affairs, finance, cyber and trade. It supports whole-of-government investment in the determinants of health and is, in essence, a more urgent and strategic way to reaffirm their critical role in an era of intersecting crises. INTERCONNECTED THREATS The accompanying diagram, developed by Tracy Smart, former surgeon general of the Australian Defence Force, makes this architecture of interconnected security dimensions visible and compelling.
ESPERANZA MARTINEZ Esperanza Martinez is a medical doctor and public health expert with more than 20 years of experience in global health and humanitarian action. She is profes- sor and head of health and human security at the Australian National University. She previously held senior leadership roles at the In- ternational Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, where she led global health programmes and crisis responses. She also advises global health organisations and serves as a Lancet Commissioner on Health, Conflict and Forced Displacement.
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Health: A Political Choice – The Future of Health in a Fractured World
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