In March 2022, intercommunal fighting forced Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) to suspend its activities after nearly fourteen years of operating in Agok, a small town located in the disputed Abyei Special Administrative Area (ASAA) on the border between Sudan and South Sudan. After the shock of having to close a 185-bed hospital unexpectedly came questions about the unintentional consequences of MSF’s presence. With the benefit of hindsight, the organisation deemed it important to examine the potentially destabilising influence it might have had on the local environment. This article builds on an internal capitalisation exercise conducted with the aim of documenting MSF’s experience and critically reflecting on the potential of aid being a factor in disrupting local balances, or worse, a factor in fuelling violence. By exploring the premises that MSF was an anchor factor for the population and that the economic fallouts made Agok a place worth fighting for, the author investigates the long-term, unintended impact of MSF’s presence on the local political economy of conflict, as well as the organisation’s possible share of responsibility for aggravating intercommunal grievances. Based on the observation that aid inevitably benefits some more than others, the author also asks to what extent MSF was aware of the adverse consequences of its presence and whether more awareness would have led to different operational choices and mitigating measures. This questioning does not detract in any way from the project’s achievements in terms of providing high-quality secondary healthcare in a context where there was none, in one of the poorest countries in the world.
The COVID-19 pandemic has proved to be much more than a health emergency, with serious social, political and economic consequences. The diverse challenges for people and communities, specifically in low- and middle-income and fragile contexts, have necessitated multi-sectoral responses from international humanitarian and development actors. For many international faith-inspired organisations (IFIOs), these responses included a faith dimension. Drawing on interviews with staff working in IFIOs during the pandemic, this paper will argue that the COVID-19 pandemic saw many, although not all, IFIOs engage with local faith actors and local communities of faith more quickly, and in increasingly diverse and meaningful ways, than during previous comparable public health crises. This shift in willingness to engage with faith and religion at the local level has been reflected, to some extent, by the broader humanitarian sphere. The COVID-19 pandemic therefore marks an important step towards more faith-literate humanitarian responses, with many IFIOs at the forefront of this progress.
While health misinformation is important to address in humanitarian settings, over-focusing on it can obfuscate a more holistic understanding of a community’s needs in a crisis. Through Médecins Sans Frontières’ experience of deploying a platform to tackle health misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic, this field report argues that, while important, health misinformation became a diversionary topic during COVID-19, which represented a lack of trust between communities, humanitarian organisations and health institutions, rather a fundamental obstacle to effective humanitarian interventions.
From our practitioners’ viewpoint, we reflect on the deployment of the ‘MSF Listen’ platform in our programmes and how it evolved from a purely misinformation-focused digital tool to a broader workflow and approach to understanding community needs in crises through accountable management of community feedback.
This paper explores findings from research carried out alongside a humanitarian project called ‘Bridging the Gap (BtG): The Role of Local Faith Actors in Humanitarian Response in South Sudan’. BtG aimed to better understand the barriers that stand in the way of engagement between local faith actors (LFAs) and international humanitarians (IHs) and to introduce learning opportunities (e.g. training and workshops) to address these. We share perspectives from the LFAs who participated in this ‘localisation’ project about what it means to become ‘legitimate’ humanitarian actors that are recognised and trusted by the international system and why this is important for them, as well as what BtG tells us about the legitimacy of the international humanitarian system from the point of view of LFAs and LFAs’ legitimacy in the eyes of their local communities. We also reflect upon the ways in which the processes of NGO-isation and professionalisation that accompany this journey to become ‘legitimate’, can compromise and undervalue the very qualities that local actors are presumed to possess. This does not indicate the failure of the localisation agenda, but that bold action is needed to make localisation more inclusive in ways that might challenge some areas of humanitarian orthodoxy.
This paper assesses the influence of the humanitarian innovation agenda on the aid sector, particularly medical humanitarian actors’ increasing reliance on digital technologies. Pressure to innovate arises from the belief that technological advancements can save lives, leading to the exploration of new technologies in humanitarian contexts. However, the rapid, often uncritical, adoption of new technologies and data practices has raised ethical, political and institutional concerns. To this end, the paper surveys key debates and ethical challenges arising from the deployment of biometric and medical data technologies in humanitarian and disaster settings. To achieve this aim, it gathers issues into three major categories of enquiry: governance, power and control; justice and equity; and trust. These categories assist in conceptualising the moral and ethical tensions between technologies, data and actors in humanitarian spaces. The ongoing deployment of biometric and medical data technologies in humanitarian and disaster contexts raises significant ethical challenges that can only be addressed by practitioners and researchers together. The paper concludes with a call to jointly assess the broader implications of medical data innovations in humanitarianism, emphasising the need for further research and collaboration among different disciplines.
Humanitarian health projects generate extensive amounts of data as part of their activities. In many situations, this data will endure long after the projects have ended. Careful attention is needed within project closure planning and implementation to decisions of when and how to share, store, return to the individuals from whom it was collected, or destroy data. Drawing on a review of the literature and guidelines related to data responsibility and project closure, we propose seven questions that can help orient reflection and deliberation around data management from the perspective of an ethics of project closure. The questions foreground considerations related to purpose limitation and data minimisation, respect for data rights, upholding duties of care, clarifying expectations, commitments and agreements, minimisation and mitigation of risk, and alignment of policy and regulatory frameworks for data responsibility. We illustrate the application of the questions to a case study of the handover of a healthcare project in a refugee camp where project activities were transferred from an international humanitarian organisation to local authorities. This analysis reinforces the importance of understanding data responsibility as an essential component of ‘closing well’.
After previous chapters have detailed what happened to the Liberal Democrat vote after 2010 and why, Chapter 8 addresses the big picture – the changing geography of Liberal Democrat support. This chapter is divided into two sections. The first details the emergence of a new Liberal Democrat geography of support. It examines the party’s growing north–south divide and how the Liberal Democrats have increasingly become a ‘south of England’ party. It also describes how the party’s political travails in 2015 and 2017 exposed the Liberal Democrats’ traditional ‘Celtic fringe’ strongholds, where historical Liberal support was hitherto already in decline. Evidence from 2019 suggests any revival looks slim. The second part of the chapter explores the changing socio-demographic composition of the Liberal Democrat vote before examining the impact of two seismic political shocks on the geography of Liberal Democrat support in Britain. It stresses how the post-referendum unionist–nationalist divide in Scotland and the fallout from Brexit exposed the underlying structural weaknesses in the party’s support and, alongside the millstone of coalition and the legacy of austerity, neutered any prospect of electoral growth. The final section is more upbeat, focusing on the green shoots of recovery in specific types of Remain seats in 2019 and newer areas where local growth is evident. The focus turns to the classification and examination of the so-called ‘Blue Wall’ and whether it provides a viable route for electoral recovery or if the party needs to unite old and new geographies of support to achieve sustainable electoral growth.
After reiterating the book’s underlying objectives, this concluding chapter discusses the core themes and key issues raised. The second section briefly deliberates on the party’s long-term and short-term goals, such as re-empowering the local, fully embracing local digital campaigning to enhance credibility, and resolving the party’s identity by decisively pitching a socially liberal rather than an economically liberal stance. The final section of the book discusses whether the party has resolved the fundamental contradictions of being an office-seeking party in the Westminster system. As such, it outlines the way forward for the Liberal Democrats and possible trajectories for the party.
Chapter 2 looks beneath the surface of the great electoral strides made by the Liberal Democrats from 1992 until 2010. It examines whether the political and electoral strategy which helped catapult the party into coalition government with the Conservatives actually dealt with the longstanding weaknesses in the party’s vote. The chapter reveals just how weak the fundamentals were and how vulnerable the Liberal Democrats had become. The first section explores how the party was still dependent on borrowed votes and lacked loyal support. It also examines how specific short-term policy positions and tailored messaging amplified its reliance on tactical support. The second part questions whether the Liberal Democrats still enjoyed a comparative campaign advantage over their rivals. The chapter provides evidence that opponents had begun to adopt Liberal Democrat grassroots tactics, local targeting, tailored messaging and place-based intensity. The final section details the growing ideological friction within the party in the run-up to the 2010 general election. It explores how factions that had coexisted for decades became more visible and vocal in their discontent with the policy platform and rhetoric of the leadership. Crucially, it evaluates whether this was at odds not only with the party’s members but also with its voters. Beneath the euphoria of entering government for the first time in 80 years, the Liberal Democrats remained politically and electorally vulnerable but chose to ignore the warning signs.