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Bertrand Taithe

Bertrand Taithe

Bertrand is a historian specializing in humanitarian medicine. He is a founding member of the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (HCRI) at the University of Manchester in 2008, he is now its director of research. He is also a member of MSF UK board. His most recent articles and books include “Unpacking the Emergency Health Kit of International Humanitarian Medical Aid 1978-1990: How Humanitarian Standards and Supply Chains became Global” (2025), “Making Hepatitis C history: Medecins sans frontières, hepatitis C and humanitarian Medicine in Cambodia” (2025), “Care, Coercion, and Gender in the Revolutionary War in Nepal, 1996-2006” (2024). He leads the Wellcome Discovery Award program "Developing Humanitarian Medicine: from Alma Ata to Bio-Tech, a history of norms, knowledge production and care (1978-2020)". His publications are available here.

illustration l'humanitaire s'exhibe Analysis

The Humanitarian Exhibition (1867-2016)

05/16/2022 Bertrand Taithe

The Swiss editor Georg just published in open access a collection of articles edited by Sébastien Farré, Jean-François Fayet and Bertrand Taithe. This book is devoted to the emergence of humanitarian exhibitions either within wider events or in their own right, as an attempt to focus attention and make sense of the aid humanitarians provided. The book argues that this exhibition process was central to the narration of the humanitarian project. It did not simply represent humanitarian work, it helped shape its essential identity and sense of purpose. Entail the development of new ways of thinking about needs and emergencies.

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A woman is building a shelter in Dadaab refugee camp Lynsey Addario Opinion

The Poverty of Humanitarian Critique?

07/08/2014 Bertrand Taithe

While MSF has just recently launched a report, 'Where is everyone?', aiming at exposing the limitations and deficiencies of the international aid response to crises, Bertrand Taithe (HCRI) asks whether the approach taken and the question asked are the right ones.

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