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exited from a context where they believed they were doing more good than harm – such as the Goma refugee crisis ( Terry, 2001 ) – there have always been plenty of other agencies willing to step in and fill the gap left behind, which simply removes those principled actors from the arena and replaces them with (presumably less principled) actors. But PM analysis likewise shines a new light on this issue as well – not simply the diversion of aid and funnelling it to
. Juxtaposing him to another celebrity humanitarian is useful for thinking about this, especially thinking about their differing ‘affective visibility’, the ‘mediated performance of the emotional labor of the White Savior’ ( Budabin and Richey, 2021 : 10). For example, Angelina Jolie is a spokesperson, 11 an empathetic vessel to connect the suffering to refugees to a broader audience. In contrast, Affleck is a doer, convening strategic partnerships and channelling funds and
years later, you don’t find many people who claim to have been formed by the Nigeria experience in the field. You find them already quite high up in organisations ( Taithe, 2016 ). So it’s interesting that they do exist, but they are already, in the space of 10 years, regarded as old hands. Quite a few of them are in decisional roles or in major positions. For example the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees from 1986 until 1989, Jean-Pierre Hocké, was an ex
need for operational ‘proximity’ to, as well as performative distance from, everyday social and political dynamics. Background MSF in North Kivu In North Kivu, international aid organisations installed themselves en masse after the influx of Rwandan refugees in 1994. The urban landscape of its capital, Goma, has been dramatically reshaped in consequence, while a range of NGOs have established projects in rural areas. The medical humanitarian organisation, MSF, has a long history in the region, having opened its first project in DRC in 1977. Today, three
both the need to be ‘where it’s happening’ (whether a refugee camp, the scene of killings or an Ebola treatment centre) and the need to limit the financial cost of such travel. Access problems are not unique to the DRC. ‘If, as a journalist, I want to know more of what is going on inside Angola or Sudan – because I smell a good story – I have no alternative but to draw on the resources of an aid organisation involved,’ noted William F. (Bill) Deedes, a
to resist or change social or political wrong through either ‘contained or transgressive tactics, excluding political violence’ (Global Activism, Ruth Reitan, 2007). 2 Re-assertion of state sovereignty was also linked to the fact that pre-1989 MSF often worked on the margins of conflicts/refugees, as opposed to directly inside, thus bringing our public critiques and
, education, etc.), situational (refugees, IDPs, armed conflict, or natural disasters) and others. Is it more impartial, in an armed conflict, to operate on the war-wounded than to offer dialysis to people in renal failure who cannot get it due to the circumstances? To provide care in an abandoned psychiatric hospital rather than clean drinking water to a neighbourhood? To take an interest in people wounded in war and turn our backs on those injured in another way? To care for
organizations’ legitimacy, and gave strength and knowledge to international advocacy and diplomacy. The massive success of the early 1980s aid campaigns to alleviate famine in Ethiopia, and to aid refugees from dictatorships in Latin America, gave a new impetus to the creation of public institutions that would sustain the popular appeal for development aid between times of emergencies ( Ermisch, 2015 ; Hutchinson, 1997 ). Among CIDA officials, efforts to ‘insert foreign aid into the collective consciousness of Canada’ ( Cogan, 2018 : 177) were also, and more immediately
exactly what happened to refugees at sea who drown. That kind of evidence is powerful as an advocacy tool, but it is also used in court. MD: The access campaign was essentially about shaming and making people feel guilty about what they do, the profit margins in the pharmaceutical market. It had a logic, like removing a law. What’s interesting in some of that naming and shaming is that it’s a way of getting people to act in certain ways. I heard feedback from someone who was passing on to me information that he had heard directly from high level Sudanese for that
and Rodogno (2016) extend their analysis up to recent images of 3-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, whose body washed up on a Turkish beach in September 2015. 2 For a trenchant analysis of race and humanitarian imagery, see Benton (2016) . 3 On the general problem with images of ‘innocent’ suffering, see Ticktin (2020) and