Wounds Without Borders offers a pioneering investigation of what happens to injured patients and healthcare infrastructures under conditions of war. The aim of the project is to investigate and map the journeys of injured civilians from spaces of injury in Syria and Iraq to spaces of care in Lebanon and Turkey. I treat war wounds as an analytic to explore the ‘slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011) of war as well as its transnational biopolitical regimes of care. The project forges a new social-science approach to war that focuses on injured bodies and wounded journeys and fosters interdisciplinary thinking about war as a producer of mass-scale disability.

In recent years infrastructures of care in Lebanon and Turkey have become a lifeline for over 5.5 million refugees fleeing violence in Syria and Iraq. However, these caring spaces are largely undocumented and little understood. This project therefore responds to an urgent gap in our understanding of the scope and effectiveness of the regional healthcare response to war and displacement in the Middle East.

The project uses a creative mixed-method approach to capture and spatialise the lived experience of injured patients. Fieldwork will be conducted in key borderland areas in Lebanon and Turkey in conjunction with local and international actors on the ground. This will consist of interviews with patients and medical-care workers, ethnographic methods focused on casualty evacuation routes and care facilities, and audio-visual documentation and mapping of patient journeys.

The project addresses ISRF goals by forging a new interdisciplinary methodology to tackle the socio-political problem of what happens to health and healthcare under conditions of war. By mapping the war-injured patient Wounds Without Borders develops new thinking about how injured patients are spatially reconfiguring healthcare infrastructures amidst one of the greatest humanitarian crises of our time.