Geopolitics and provision of veterinary research

VETERINARY research generally presents itself as a neutral and technical enterprise governed by evidence and insulated from politics. However, when there is discord and fighting, research systems, including those supporting veterinary research, are disrupted. In many cases these systems are not merely experiencing ‘collateral damage’ but are being systematically dismantled, with laboratories, surveillance networks and scientific infrastructure increasingly appearing as deliberate targets rather than incidental losses.1 Currently, the deliberate destruction of infrastructure and severe movement restrictions in Gaza have effectively eradicated research capacity, mirroring patterns of institutional suffocation documented across occupied health systems.2 Similarly, in Ukraine, targeted attacks on agricultural regions and veterinary facilities do more than decimate livestock populations, they blind the surveillance of transboundary diseases, transforming local conflict into a global biosecurity risk. These are not temporary disruptions. Longitudinal evidence demonstrates that the institutional erosion produced by armed conflict persists for decades beyond the cessation of direct violence,3 leaving countries such as Syria and Yemen with fragmented, donor-dependent systems incapable of sustained surveillance or autonomous research.4 This disruption is further compounded by forced displacement, which reshapes veterinary landscapes through unregulated animal movements and altered human-animal-environmental interfaces, precisely as the capacity to study these risks collapses.5 “Targeted attacks on agricultural regions and veterinary facilities blind the surveillance of trans-boundary diseases, transforming local conflict into a global biosecurity risk The current status quo aligns the discipline with a global system that decides, through bombs and blockades, who may produce knowledge and who is excluded from it. A One Health framework that declines to engage with these power relations is not apolitical, it is making a political choice and calling it neutrality.11 If the discipline takes this seriously, journals, funders and professional bodies can act, by protecting collaborations with researchers in conflict-affected and sanctioned regions, by opening editorial space for voices from those regions so they are heard rather than spoken about, and by naming these dynamics openly rather than describing them in the passive voice.