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.

Kevin 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).

Michaël Neuman est l'invité de Cultures Monde, sur France Culture, aux côtés de Lucile Grosjean, chargée de plaidoyer chez Action contre la Faim, et Philippe Ryfman, professeur et chercheur associé.

This article has been inspired by an analysis conducted by MSF-Crash of humanitarian security management and why and in what ways it is evolving. We endeavour not only to describe humanitarian imagery, but to analyse its consequences - the risks it generates for aid workers operating in perilous situations. 

Interview with Pierre Mendiharat, deputy director of operations (MSF).

Fabrice Weissman, directeur d'études à MSF-Crash, présente le livre "Secourir sans périr. La sécurité humanitaire à l'ère de la gestion des risques", co-dirigé avec Michaël Neuman (CNRS, 2016).

Interview with Michaël Neuman and Fabrice Weissman, research directors at Crash. On Wednesday 28 September, MSF is invited to attend a UN Security Council briefing on resolution 2286, adopted in May 2016, which strongly condemns attacks against medical personnel and establishments in conflict situations.

Dans cet épisode des podcasts d’Ombres Blanches, Michaël Neuman présente l’ouvrage du Crash : Secourir Sans Périr. La Sécurité humanitaire à l’ère de la gestion des risques.

Michael Neuman is interviewed by TRT World about Doctors Without Borders/MSF's decision to pull out of Yemen and humanitarian security, challenging the idea that humanitarian action has become a greater danger to aid workers.

In recent years, fear-mongering reports based on hard data have been describing a world of ever-increasing danger for aid workers. The book "Saving lives and staying alive" explores this observation and compares it with MSF's experience of working in particularly dangerous regions.

Rony 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.

Fabrice Weissman, directeur d'études au Crash, co-auteur de "Secourir sans périr" (CNRS Editions, 2016), répond aux questions de l'Institut de Relations Internationales et Stratégiques (IRIS).