Humanitarian actors and practices

Djibo Camp - Burkina Fasso Nisma Leboul Interview

What difficulties does MSF face in the Sahel?

06/24/2024 Hamadoun Dicko

Following a series of coups d'état in recent years in Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, the Sahel region is undergoing a major redefinition. In a context of high insecurity, what are the possibilities for accessing populations? What are the conditions under which our teams are operating, and can we do more? This interview with Hamadoun Dicko, who is in charge of access issues in the Sahel for MSF, was originally published association's website of MSF-France.

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Jeddah camp Candida Lobes Analysis

Crisis and Humanitarian Containment

12/19/2023 Fabrice Weissman

Challenging the idea that humanitarian actors can act free from politics by virtue of their principles, this chapter argues that the politicization of humanitarian aid is in fact the primary condition for its deployment. Humanitarian actors can only act if they maintain a balance between their own interests and those of people in positions of power. This raises a crucial ethical question: At what point do humanitarian organisations consider that deals reached with political powers cross the blurred but very real line beyond which humanitarian assistance does more harm than good?

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Video

Journal of Humanitarian Affairs : Volume 5 (2023), Issue 1 (Sep 2023): Humanitarian Numbers

11/23/2023

On September 14th, 2023, the Journal of Humanitarian Affairs, the academic journal in open access, hosted jointly by the Crash, The Humanitarian Affairs Team at Save the Children UK (HAT) and the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester (HCRI), has published a new issue entitled “Humanitarian numbers”. The latter focuses on the technical aspect of numbers, dealing with two main questions: What datafication means? How well does the quantitative represent reality?

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Interview

Thinking on and beyond the concept of de-westernization

10/16/2023 Rony Brauman

This interview by Didier Billion and Marc Verzeroli was originally published in the Revue internationale et stratégique. To examine the concept of de-westernization, Rony Brauman describes the current state of international relations, marked by fluid alliances and new power relationships. He states and details his reservations about whether universal values truly exist and how the international criminal justice system functions.

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Rwandan Refugees in Congo Frederic Sautereau News in brief

Listen to the MSF Speaking Out podcast: “The Hunting and Killing of Rwandan refugees in Zaire-Congo 1996-1997”.

01/05/2023 Laurence Binet

MSF releases the podcast “MSF Speaking Out: The Hunting and Killing of Rwandan refugees in Zaire-Congo 1996-1997” describing the dilemmas, challenges and controversies faced by the MSF teams including: could MSF communicate publicly on the health condition of the refugees when its access to them had recently been denied? When it realised its teams were being used to lure and kill refugees, should the organisation cease its activities and condemn this manipulation?

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Plumpy’Nut is being handed out in Ndougoury village. Djerabe Ndegrgar Opinion

Resale of therapeutic food: who benefits from demonising mothers?

12/30/2022 Michel-Olivier Lacharité

This article was published on December 26th, 2022 on the Souk, the MSF associative website.
Accusing the mothers of malnourished children of being lawless fraudsters is a well-worn trope in malnutrition treatment programmes worldwide – and one that has resurfaced recently in Nigeria, stirred up by health workers and the media. These types of accusations obscure a series of tricky truths on the control of resources, the quality of malnutrition treatment programmes, and on the extreme precariousness in which many families live. We see all of this in northwest Nigeria’s Katsina state, where we are currently conducting the largest malnutrition programme in the history of Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF).

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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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