We often hear it said within MSF that the aid system is unable to provide effective relief, or that the aid system's ability to provide aid is in decline. Rony Brauman and Michaël Neuman aim at exploring MSF's relationship with the aid system, while showing how the ambitions of the aid system itself have evolved.

Three years after it occurred, Haiti's cholera epidemic is still in the news.

How do Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) differ, and how are they alike?

In this chronicle "Alternatives Internationales", Rony Brauman discusses the return of using community health workers as primary access points for healthcare, in the recommendations of the WHO and practices of some governments.

Considering that the United Nations juridictions officially recognises six genocides, Rony Brauman considers unjustifiable the fact that the French Parliament only recognises . The only alternative is to recognise all of them or none.

In this interview conducted by Claudine Vidal in 2012 and published in the book Agir à Tout Prix (Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: the MSF experience), Rony Brauman speaks about emergency humanitarian aid set up following natural disasters. Time constraints, access to victims, cooperation with local institutions, misleading representations of the disasters' effects, controversial assessments of the number of casualties; various topics related to these interventions are discussed and illustrated with specific examples.

Humanitarian medicine is made up of a wide range of practices with few obvious connections between them. Battlefield medicine and surgery, rural dispensaries in remote areas, campaigns to raise awareness about health problems in poor countries, emergency teams in disaster situations, vaccination campaigns, health education, help for marginalised groups in affluent countries and public health advice are just some examples of actions that fall within the scope of “humanitarian medicine” when they are carried out by organisations and in circumstances that can be classified as “humanitarian”.

Rony Brauman discusses several aspects and issues related humanitarian action as well as the good reasons to wish Médecins sans frontières a happy 40th anniversary.

In the context of emergency appeals in the Horn of Africa, Rony Brauman recalls the contemporary definition of a famine. While recognising the progress made in major crisis response mechanisms, he questions the alarmist attitude of the UN.