Jehan Bseiso

Michiel Hofman

Jonathan Whittall

"In February 2012, in its first public position on the unfolding armed conflict in Syria, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) published a series of testimonies gathered from Syrian doctors working in the country. The testimonies described the challenges and horrors facing doctors trying to treat wounded patients and protesters injured by Syrian authorities (MSF 2012). In its report, MSF denounced the use of "medicine as a weapon of persecution" in Syria and called on the government to "re-establish the neutrality of healthcare facilities" (Ibid.) In a press release published a year later, MSF further decried that aid was not being distributed "equally" between government- and opposition-controlled areas and argued that "areas under government control receive nearly all international aid, while opposition-held zones receive only a tiny share." (MSF 2013) In an opinion piece, two MSF staff members criticized humanitarian actors working with the authorization of the Syrian government and called on those aid agencies to recognise "the de-facto partitioning of the state" (Weissman and Rodrigue 2013). Such calls from humanitarian actors, which on other occasions claimed neutrality, played into the polarization of the Syrian conflict. The Syrian government actively controlled aid delivery and distribution from Damascus, with the support of Russia and Iran. Aid from Damascus was distributed by the United Nations, the Syrian Arab Red Crescent society, and a handful of other organizations working in government-controlled areas. Meanwhile, aid was delivered across the borders from neighboring countries by opposition groups, civil society activists, and Western humanitarian actors"--

The Politics of Aid in the Syria Crisis

Everybody's War

The Syrian crisis is one of the most serious humanitarian disasters in recent history. Yet the widely reported numbers--more than 6 million displaced, including 5 million refugees--reflect only a fractional toll of the conflict. Numerous international organizations, states, and civil society movements have called for the laws of war to be respected, sieges lifted, and humanitarian access facilitated. But beneath each of these humanitarian appeals lies a complicated reality extending beyond the binary narratives that have come to define the war in Syria. Everybody's War examines the complexities of humanitarianism in Syria and the wide-ranging consequences for both Syria's populations and humanitarian responses to future conflicts. Organized by Médecins Sans Frontières, this edited volume brings together academics and humanitarian practitioners from across the globe to provide a multitude of perspectives on the politics of aid in the Syrian war. Contributors explore the humanitarian crisis behind the Syrian conflict through the history and fragmentation of Syrian health care, the role of international humanitarian law in enabling attacks on health facilities, and the lived experience of siege in all its layers. Further attention is given to the ways in which humanitarian actors have fed the war economy and joined the information wars that have raged throughout the region over the past ten years. While the Syrian crisis has been everybody's war, it has certainly not been everybody's victory. This volume shares the intricate story of aid delivery and humanitarian complicity within one of the defining conflicts of the twenty-first century.

Sokhieng Au

The 2014-2015 Ebola epidemic in West Africa was an unprecedented medical and political emergency that cast an unflattering light on multiple corners of government and international response. Fear, not rational planning, appeared to drive many decisions made at population and leadership levels, which in turn brought about a response that was as uneven as it was unprecedented: entire populations were decimated or destroyed, vaccine trials were fast-tracked, health staff died, untested medications were used (or not used) in controversial ways, humanitarian workers returned home to enforced isolation, and military was employed to sometimes disturbing ends. The epidemic revealed serious fault lines at all levels of theory and practice of global public health: national governments were shown to be helpless and unprepared for calamity at this scale; the World Health Organization was roundly condemned for its ineffectiveness; the US quietly created its own African CDC a year after the epidemic began. Amid such chaos, Médecins sans Frontières was forced to act with unprecdented autonomy -- and amid great criticism -- in responding to the disease, taking unprecedented steps in deploying services and advocating for international aid. The Politics of Fear provides a primary documentary resource for recounting and learning from the Ebola epidemic. Comprising eleven topic-based chapters and four eyewitness vignettes from both MSF- and non-MSF-affiliated contributors (all of whom have been given access to MSF Ebola archives from Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia for research), it aims to provide a politically agnostic account of the defining health event of the 21st century so far, one that will hopefully inform current opinions and future responses.

Michiel Hofman

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