Omar Dewachi is Associate Professor of medical anthropology at Rutgers University and is the co-founder and co-Director of the Conflict Medicine Program, at the American University of Beirut’s Global Health Institute. Trained as a physician in Iraq during the 1990s, he received his doctorate in social anthropology from Harvard University in 2008. Dewachi’s work examines the social, medical and environmental impacts of decades of war and violence in Iraq and the broader Middle East. His book, Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq (SUP 2017), is the first study documenting the untold story of the rise of state medicine in Iraq under colonial and post-colonial regimes of rule and the unmaking of state infrastructure under decades of US interventions in the country. He is currently working on an ethnographic project that examines the ecologies of wounds and wounding. The research chronicles the biosocial life of war wounds, the rise of Multi-Drug Resistant Bacteria, and the reconfigurations of healthcare and humanitarian mobilities across East of the Mediterranean states. He is the author of numerous publications that have appeared in a number of medical, anthropological, and global health journals, including the Lancet. He is a long-term advisor to organizations, such as MSF and ICRC on the medical and humanitarian crisis in the region, and currently serves as a Commissioner on the Lancet Commission on Syria: Health in Conflict.

Anthropology

Ethnography

Colonialism

Health

State Formation

Theory

Music

19th-21st Centuries

India

Iraq

Lebanon

Mashreq

Morocco

Iraq

Arabic (native)

English (fluent)

French (intermediate)

Persian (elementary)