Xavier Crombé & Joanna Kuper
Xavier Crombé was Director of Studies at MSF-Crash from 2005 to 2008. He is currently working at the Research Unit on Humanitarian Stakes and Practices (UREPH) of MSF in Switzerland to publish a collective essay dealing with issues related to violence in healthcare facilities. He is also teaching humanitarian and migration issues at Sciences Po Paris.
MSc candidate in Public Health for Development at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London; former humanitarian affairs officer for MSF-Holland in South Sudan.
This article was published in The Journal of Humanitarian Affairs - May 2019.
This article seeks to document and analyse violence affecting the provision of healthcare by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and its intended beneficiaries in the early stage of the current civil war in South Sudan. Most NGO accounts and quantitative studies of violent attacks on healthcare tend to limit interpretation of their prime motives to the violation of international norms and deprivation of access to health services. Instead, we provide a detailed narrative, which contextualises violent incidents affecting healthcare, with regard for the dynamics of conflict in South Sudan as well as MSF’s operational decisions, and which combines and contrasts institutional and academic sources with direct testimonies from local MSF personnel and other residents. This approach offers greater insight not only into the circumstances and logics of violence but also into the concrete ways in which healthcare practices adapt in the face of attacks and how these may reveal and put to the test the reciprocal expectations binding international and local health practitioners in crisis situations.
To cite this content :
Xavier Crombé, Joanna Kuper, War Breaks Out: Interpreting Violence on Healthcare in the Early Stage of the South Sudanese Civil War,
22 November 2019,
URL : https://msf-crash.org/en/publications/war-and-humanitarianism/war-breaks-out-interpreting-violence-healthcare-early-stage
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