Antimicrobial Resistance, Conflict, and Security (ARCS) community

In 2019, AMR accounted for 4.95 million deaths, leading to the UK government committing over £85 million to tackle AMR globally in 2024. In parallel, the UK biosecurity strategy involves an annual investment of over £1.5 billion in addressing biological threats and aims to build world-class crisis capabilities. Attempts by security actors to address AMR using existing approaches have failed to engage with the scope and complexity of the problem. At the same time, UK Biological Security Strategy (BSS) positions AMR as a core security threat. The complex realities of AMR in conflict zones, criminal networks, and unsurveilled and unsupervised settings remain largely unaddressed and often intractable, meaning new approaches are urgently required to conceptualise and address AMR as a joint civilian security issue that disproportionately impacts vulnerable groups.

GW4 Antimicrobial Resistance, Conflict, and Security (ARCS) community brings together experts and decisionmakers to explore the complex relationships between national security and AMR, answering a pressing strategic need co-identified between policy-partners and GW4 researchers. ARCS will build an interdisciplinary network to map the landscape, identify new ways of working, and collaborative opportunities. ARCS will mobilise UKRI national AMR CLIMAR and IMPACT networks with partners at the UK Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO) and UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratories (DSTL), using collaborative scoping research, workshops, and engagement activities to build a pathway for future work.