Recap – The Afterlives of the Clinic: AMR, Conflict, and the Future of Global Health, with Omar Dewachi

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Published on April 16, 2026

On February 4, 2026, Dr. Omar Dewachi, medical anthropologist, historian and former physician, Chair and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, led a lecture on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and its implications on the afterlives of the clinic.

Dr. Dewachi began by reflecting on his fieldwork trip to Mosul, Iraq, in 2023, six years after the war with ISIS. The aftermath of war, he argued is not only visible in ruined buildings, but in the slow transformations of everyday life. Hospitals and clinics–once sites of recovery– had been deeply disrupted, reshaping how illness is treated and how patients live with injury over time.  

Next, Dr. Dewachi showed a Cumulative Antibiogramme – a chart mapping resistance patterns across bacterial strains from patients in Mosul. Resistance exceeded 70% across most antibiotic classes. This was not simply a clinical finding, but a historical one: the antibiogram captured how war reshapes biology.  It reflected a healthcare system defined by interruption, fragmentation, and repeated exposure to antibiotics, where microbes adapt to the same conditions of instability as the patients they inhabit.

In such settings, care unfolds through repetitive circuits. Patients between hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies, often receiving overlapping or uncoordinated treatments. Wounds return unresolved, Wounds return unresolved, and antibiotics are administered without coordination or continuity of care.

Furthermore, Dr. Dewachi shared that, in order to understand AMR as one of the afterlives of war, we need to follow the circuits through which knowledge about AMR travels. During the early years of the US invasion in Iraq, military hospitals began reporting unusual infections among wounded soldiers. Acinetobacter baumannii–later dubbed Iraqibacter– became a central object of concern. It was tracked, sequenced, and analyzed within US laboratories, triggering new regimes of surveillance and infection control.

Yet this recognition was uneven. In the United States, the bacterium was framed as a foreign threat, implicitly displacing responsibility onto Iraqi environments and bodies. In Iraq, however, the same phenomenon appeared differently—not as a named pathogen, but as wounds that failed to heal, infections that persisted, and treatments that no longer worked. Resistance was lived clinically before it was recognized scientifically.

In Iraq however, this epistemic disjunction was manifesting in a different way. Iraqi doctors did not encounter Acinetobacter; rather, it was exhibited as infections that were becoming harder to control, and wounds that were not healing, and patients dissatisfied by the recovery they expected. The use of antibiotics had already become routine clinical response; broad spectrum antibiotics were prescribed preemptively and repetitively.

From this, Dr. Dewachi introduced the concept of war biology – the ways in which prolonged conflict inscribed itself, not only in bodies and wounds, but also in microbes, infrastructure, and the everyday ecologies in which medicine operates. War does not simply destroy hospitals, it actively reshapes the terrain on which care takes place, producing new forms of risk that persists long after the war presides.

Antimicrobial resistance emerges through this reorganization: through the collapse and fragmentation of healthcare systems, the collapse of diagnostic and stewardship practices, environmental damage that contaminates urban space, and displacements of patients, clinicians and microbes across borders. Resistance, in this sense, is not an isolated biological event but the cumulative effect of these conditions.

Ultimately, stewardship, surveillance and new drugs are not enough. Efforts to address antimicrobial resistance will fail if they do not confront the political and ecological conditions that produce it.

War leaves behind more than destruction. It generates biological and institutional afterlives that continue to shape how medicine is practiced and how lives are sustained. Antimicrobial resistance is one of the most consequential of these afterlives: written in wounds that do not close, in microbes that resist treatment, and clinics that struggle to hold care together.

Connect with Dr. Omar Dewachi

Watch the full seminar here: https://youtu.be/P7dnR6lnbBY

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