In this interview, anthropologist and physician, Omar Dewachi, discusses the building, dismantling, and outsourcing of the Iraqi health care system. In addition to examining the impact of migration on Iraqi patients and Lebanese healthcare today, Dewachi historicizes accusations of Iraq`s "ungovernability" from the colonial until the present, and places the conversation within a larger context of the impacts of war on healthcare.
The interview below includes four parts that you can click on separately.
Omar Dewachi is an assistant professor of anthropology and global health at the American University of Beirut (AUB). He trained as a medical doctor in Iraq during the 1990s and received his PhD in Social Anthropology from Harvard University in 2008. He teaches a variety of courses on social medicine, global health and medical anthropology. He has a forthcoming book titled: Ungovernable Life: War and Mandatory Medicine in Iraq. The book is based on archival and ethnographic research that chronicles the interconnections between medicine and statecraft in Iraq. He is currently conducting an ethnography on the ecologies of wounds and wounding in Iraq and Syria. He leads the War and Global Health Working Group at AUB and is one of the contributors to the Costs of War Project at Brown University.
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