Deadly proximities: zoonotic risk, one health, and ethics of care in conflict

Abstract This article critically examines the One Health (OH) framework in conflict-affected humanitarian settings, where zoonotic disease outbreaks are frequently approached as technocratic challenges. Drawing on case studies from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Ebola), Yemen (dengue fever), and Syria (rabies), it shows how zoonoses are embedded within complex socio-political and ecological crises, intensified by political violence, displacement, distrust, and the collapse of health systems. Integrating three illustrative case studies with theoretical analysis, this article contends that zoonotic diseases in conflict settings cannot be sufficiently addressed or understood through biomedical or epidemiological models alone. Instead, it advances a relational and socio-politically grounded interpretation of OH that considers structural violence, multispecies vulnerability, and the specific conditions shaping disease transmission and response. The concept of care is employed as an analytical lens to examine how conflict disrupts the practical and institutional conditions through which zoonotic diseases are prevented and managed. Here, care draws attention not only to clinical treatment but also to the infrastructures, relationships of trust, surveillance practices, and human and animal health systems on which effective responses depend. This perspective helps clarify how the practical implementation of One Health is constrained by conflict and institutional breakdown. Thus, OH is treated both as a practical framework and as an object of critique, with its relevance in humanitarian settings dependent on its critical reorientation toward the lived realities of war, displacement, and environmental disruption.