From differentiated care to racial discrimination? The example of maternal health in France

This Crash dossier gathers a selection of Crash publications published over the last twenty years: all of them, in different manners, tackle the themes of racism and humanitarian action. They also evoke the way discussions about racism have been addressed at Médecins sans Frontières. 

With the cold war over, refugees have lost their status as an instrument of western soft power, whereas with the economic crisis and terrorism, hostility towards migrants is increasing. Prevailing representations of migration movements are convincing a growing proportion of the European population that migrants are a threat and refugees a burden. This file contains a collection of publications (articles, opinion columns, blog articles, press releases, CRASH papers) from 1990 to date, focusing on two themes : 1° the dichotomy between hospitality policy and migration policy, 2° camps approached from a number of different angles.  

Several texts by members and associates of the CRASH published between 1994 and 2014 are united in this collection. In 2017, a book joins these publications: Humanitarian aid, genocide and mass killings: Médecins Sans Frontières, the Rwandan experience (1982-1997)

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).

Confronted with a "totally unprecedented biological, social and political event", Jean-Hervé Bradol spoke with Mediapart about the difficulties of basing all prevention on behavioural measures: "It takes time for a society to fully acknowledge the existence of the event, which is unfolding as it tries to understand it.”