How can aid workers help war victims without falling prey to, or becoming complicit with, their persecutors?
Humanitarian organisations have an ambiguous relationship with the violence of war. Seeking to relieve its severity, they contribute to its continuation to varying degrees while subjecting themselves to becoming targets. This collection of studies explores the way aid workers attempt to “humanise” war and face the risk of becoming victims of or complicit in the war.
Debate: Judi Rever will not let anything stand in the way of her quest to document a second Rwandan genocide
06/06/2018Published in March 2018, Judi Rever’s investigative work, In Praise of Blood, quickly garnered international attention. It is an indictment of both the Rwandan patriotic front (RPF) and its leader, current Rwandan president Paul Kagame, and foreign governments and international institutions – the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), in particular – that allowed crimes committed against Hutu civilians to go unpunished.Judi Rever’s book is more than a work of investigation. It reads like a prosecutor’s closing argument: the massacres are described in such a way as to classify them as genocide. And it is precisely this combination of investigation and the pursuit of evidence that would stand up in a court of law that is problematic.
Review "Saving Lives and Staying Alive: Humanitarian Security in the Age of Risk Management"
11/24/2017Kevin MacMahon's review of "Saving Lives and Staying Alive: Humanitarian Security in the Age of Risk Management" (Michaël Neuman and Fabrice Weissman, London: C. Hurst & Co, 2016) is published in the Journal for the Study of Peace and Conflict (2016, pages 69-70).
Dictators’ Democratic Friends
10/27/2017This op-ed article was published on 27 October 2017 in the French weekly Marianne. He writes it in the backdrop of a controversy around a "Que Sais-Je" book on Rwanda published by the Belgian researcher, Filip Reyntjens and the accusations against him that he rewrites history and seeks to minor the genocide of the Tutsis in 1994.
Writing About Rwanda: President Kagame’s Fellow Travellers
10/23/2017How can anyone write about Rwanda without being called a denialist? Marc Le Pape tries to craft an answer in this article, published on the website The Conversation on 19 October 2017.
Humanitarian aid, genocide and mass killings. Médecins Sans Frontières, the Rwandan experience, 1982-97
11/04/2016Throughout the 1990s, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) was forced to face the challenges posed by the genocide of Rwandan Tutsis and a succession of major outbreaks of political violence in Rwanda and its neighbouring countries.
Humanitarian aid, genocide and mass killings. Médecins Sans Frontières, the Rwandan experience, 1982-97
11/04/2016 Read moreWar and humanitarian aid
07/25/2016Rony Brauman focuses on the humanitarian environment and practices in war, in order to try to understand and analyze its political and ethical stakes. Starting with the creation of the Red Cross at the end of the XIXth century, he then focused on the contemporary postcolonial period, switching between various scales and reporting on contradictory points of view and issues.
Saving Lives and Staying Alive: Humanitarian Security in the Age of Risk Management
03/29/2016When MSF nurse Chantal Kaghoma regained her freedom in August 2014 after being held hostage for thirteen months by rebel group ADF in the DRC, she said, “While I was in prison with all the other hostages, I had lost all faith in everyone"
Review "Aid in Danger: The Perils and Promise of Humanitarianism"
03/29/2016This review of Larissa Fast's " 'Aid in Danger'. The Perils and Promise of Humanitarianism" was published in the International Review of the Red Cross (Volume 96 / Issue 894)