Held on Friday, 09 Oct 2026 at 6:30pm

Venue: Apothecaries' Hall, Black Friar's Lane, London EC4V 6EJ

Presenting The Care of Strangers: Frontiers of Humanitarian Action (Audrey Few lecture)

To be given by Mr Chris Lockyear

Care in conflict zones asks more of humanitarians than clinical or programmatic competence. Christopher Lockyear examines what happens when they are thrust into geopolitical crunch points: their role in accountability and testimony where journalism is banned, their responsibility to their own teams, and what they concede to reach a patient at all.

Good intentions are not the only measure when the act of care is itself a form of geopolitical capital. The lecture asks who is spending that capital, on whose behalf, and what we should do about it.

Mr Christopher Lockyear has spent two decades providing medical care where war had stopped it, in Sudan, Somalia, Palestine and Ukraine. For seven and a half years he was Secretary General of Médecins Sans Frontières, an organisation of nearly 70,000 staff across more than 70 countries, and spoke for it at the United Nations Security Council. He is now Executive-in-Residence at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, a senior adviser to the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, and a non-executive director of TRIAL International, which fights impunity for war crimes.