Articles

   This reading list gathers articles and videos published between February and June 2024.

Looking at MSF programming today we see a variety of social support initiatives, as well as projects aimed at treating people in situations of socio-economic difficulty: programs for drug users in Iran, cash distributions for HIV and cancer patients in Malawi, protection and social support for migrants and refugees in Libya. However, the provision of social support is often seen as a marginal activity and there is debate about the appropriateness or relevance, or even the effectiveness, of such activities.
 
This paper by Jacob Burns on social support is divided in two parts. In the introduction “Practices and Motivations”, he suggests a rough outline of different ‘social’ problems that MSF has turned to and the moments at which it has done so, between the 1980s and the 2010s: street children and people living in slums ; Mission France ; Projects addressing human immunodeficiency virus, tuberculosis, and sexual and gender-based violence ; the responses to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa (2013-2015) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (2018-2019). The author argues that it is possible to break down the motivations for providing social support into three broad categories: to help achieve therapeutic success, to aid the effectiveness of our operations, to enhance the ‘well-being’ of the person.
 
The second part of the paper is a report of a field visit conducted in October – November 2023 to Goma, DRC. The visit was undertaken with an ethnographic approach: completing observations of the teams’ work with conversations with team members during which Jacob Burns tried to understand as much as possible their reasoning and motivations for the decisions they took. As the author himself says, this paper poses more questions than it provides answers: how do we judge what the ‘real’ needs of people are? What role giving money should have in the provision of humanitarian aid? What agency a person should have when receiving aid? To what extent MSF should work on the sources of the problems it is trying to address, rather than just their symptoms or consequences?

In this article, historian Eleanor Davey examines the concept of failure in the humanitarian sector through the experience of MSF and its reform process, known as La Mancha, which began in the early 2000s. The text highlights the challenges faced by MSF in recognising and resolving internal inequalities within the organisation.

Challenging the idea that humanitarian actors can act free from politics by virtue of their principles, this chapter argues that the politicization of humanitarian aid is in fact the primary condition for its deployment. Humanitarian actors can only act if they maintain a balance between their own interests and those of people in positions of power. This raises a crucial ethical question: At what point do humanitarian organisations consider that deals reached with political powers cross the blurred but very real line beyond which humanitarian assistance does more harm than good?

This article was published in the London Review of books website on September 8, 2023. The former evokes the dire conditions in which roughly 1 000 000 Rohingyas live in Cox’s Bazar, the largest refugee camp in the world. In this coastal district in south-east Bangladesh, the humanitarian deployment is impressive, but commitment by donors is waning. Between March and June, monthly food allocations fell from $12 to $8 per person. The difficulties of accessing care, the social control to which they are subjected and the lack of prospects are many reasons explaining the perils faced by the Rohingya population.

This interview by Didier Billion and Marc Verzeroli was originally published in the Revue internationale et stratégique. To examine the concept of de-westernization, Rony Brauman describes the current state of international relations, marked by fluid alliances and new power relationships. He states and details his reservations about whether universal values truly exist and how the international criminal justice system functions.

In Groupe URD's new issue of "Humanitaires en mouvement" (n°25), Michaël Neuman describes rescue operations in the Mediterranean and the strategies put in place by MSF to adapt to the constraints imposed by governments.

The central question raised in this discussion relates to two profoundly intermeshed issues for humanitarian practitioners and organisations: the use of history for humanitarian organisations, and the need for them to preserve and maintain archives

Michaël Neuman describes his visit to Goma’s IDP camps, where he spent two weeks. He shares his dismay at the low level of assistance provided by the aid sector, especially when we recall that the Sphere standards, born precisely out of the failure of the humanitarian response in this same region of Goma in the mid-1990s, were conceived and championed by all of us.

This article was published on March 27th, 2023 in the journal Alternatives Humanitaires, in an edition focused on mental health.