Introducing the commercial determinants of health: the arms industry as a case

Abstract

Armed conflicts have sharply increased worldwide, with rising civilian deaths, displacement, and destruction across the Global South and beyond. While conflict is often framed through security and geopolitics, the commercial determinants of health perspective highlights how corporate actors shape and profit from these crises. This presentation opens the workshop panel with an overview of the commercial determinants of health and the corporate playbook, showing how industry strategies and tactics create harmful conditions while securing commercial advantage and prioritising profit over public health. It focuses on the arms industry as a major commercial determinant of morbidity and mortality that, although commonly portrayed as essential for national security, frequently generates substantial profits without necessarily improving safety. The arms industry functions as a proximal determinant of death, injury, disability, and environmental destruction when its products are used as intended. It also acts as a distal determinant through political influence, shaping decisions related to war, diverting public resources away from health and social sectors, normalising militarism, fostering university collaborations, and promoting corporate social responsibility initiatives that influence research and policy agendas. Low- and middle-income countries bear a disproportionate burden of these harms, particularly in the Middle East, where arms-related violence intersects with colonial histories, geopolitical intervention, and fragile health systems. The presentation argues for expanding commercial determinants of health scholarship to crisis settings and war profiteering, and for situating armed conflict as a preventable driver of global health inequities.