How Should Individual Military Clinicians Navigate Fraught Pasts of Their Collective Organizations and Nations During Global Health Engagements?

Military global health engagements (GHEs) present complex ethical questions to clinicians with dual professional roles as physicians and officers. These questions’ importance is heightened in regions with histories of colonialism and exploitation, where well-intentioned actions can still perpetuate harms. This article identifies “traditional” ethics frameworks’ limitations for addressing these harms and tension around them and proposes a context-sensitive and relationally grounded alternative to making clinical and ethical guidelines for clinicians, planners, military leaders, and policymakers engaged in military global health. This article describes the importance of an alternative ethical framework that draws on values such as humility, responsiveness, and sustained local partnership.