In our first lecture, Dr. Skip Burkle introduces us to the changing trends of conflict and calamity in the world. Skip is something of an establishment in humanitarian relief. Among his many accomplishments, he is a professor and senior fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. He's a senior international public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. He was founder and director of the Center of Excellence and Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance, a World Health Organization collaborating center. And was Interim Minister of Health in Iraq, and has acted as liaison, consultant, and advisor for many organizations, including the U.S. State Department, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the International Rescue Committee. >> I'm Dr. Skip Burkel, I'm a senior fellow and scientist at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative at Harvard University. I'm here to talk to you about the changing face of humanitarian crises. And conflicts that we're seeing in the world. And this is, we're really talking about global health. And when I say global health, I'm not talking about clinical, medical health. I am, that's inclusive, but we're really talking about health of nations. Health of of regions. And, and global health. The health of the planet. What's important to know is that the, the causes of humanitarian crises and conflict have really changed every one to two decades since World War II. And I'll fill you in on that as we go along. But what we're dealing with today is new languages, new taxonomies, and many new actors that are part of the humanitarian effort and the complexity of the situations that we're dealing with. The role of everybody involved, whether it be nation states or non-governmental organizations, international organizations like the U.N., and the militaries is that it's in, becoming increasingly complex, confusing, politically charged, and increasingly risky. But one of the common threads to look at and why we talk about this in terms of health. Is that these crises, the ones that we have in the emerging crises, and the complexities of them, all produce a common thread, is that they all produce major public health emergencies. We did this study about three years ago. And what is shows is looking really at the populations across the world that are exposed to conflict. And this really starts after World War II. We're really dealing with, cross border wars. And if we looked at the people who died, the deaths, mortality, and those people exposed to the conflicts. They went along [COUGH] together until we began to see a departure in the 1990's. When we began to s, to recognize that we had less and less in terms of declared cross border wars, but were getting increasing numbers of people exposed to conflict. And the reason for this, is that at the end of World War II, was also the signing of the UN charter. But the UN charter really deals with, even today, with declared cross border wars. It also codified the Geneva Conventions. And the emerging international humanitarian laws. That were written to protect the civilian populations exposed to war and, and to conflict. This trend has changed dramatically and it stayed. Pretty much constant during the Cold War. But in las, late 1980's, early 1990's, the end of the Cold War, we began to see breaking off of the countries that were either under the egess of the Soviet Union or the West. Were now left to their own egess and were having internal interstate problems. So, we began to see more unconventional kinds of conflict that were dealing with interstate conflicts. But by the beginning of this century the interstate conflicts, [COUGH], new, media driven social conflicts, like we saw with the Arab Spring. New actors like al-Qaeda and the affiliates. Increasing private militaries, etc., became the norm. And so that is what we are dealing with today. This is also fueled by massive numbers of bored and disaffected youth. We look at the Middle East, but not just the Middle East alone, certainly in other areas of Asia. We have a large number of, of young adults. Sometimes they make up to 75% of the population. Under the age of 25. And, and part of adolescence, part of young adulthood is to have an effect on the world, have a job, family, all the things that we strive for. But these opportunities are not necessarily open in areas where there's high poverty rates, high unemployment, et cetera. So you may not recognize this this photograph. But there's a person in the, in the front, kneeling down in front of this pink Cadillac. But that's Osama Bin Laden. And at one time he was a wild and crazy youth. With lots of admirers including women who are not wearing Muslim garb. But that doesn't mean that he was happy. As, he had a lot of money, but not necessarily what he wanted to do in life and he turned, in a, a, in another direction. But it does depict the fact that a lot of young adults are disaffected and bored and not satisfied with the direction they think their countries or the globe is going. Adding those conflicts on to, emerging issues, like extreme weather conflicts, increasing issues with rapid unsustainable urbanization of cities throughout the world. Biodiversity crises, and emergencies of scarcity, which we will define as we go along, have compounded the issues tied to conflicts.