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Carefully researched and delightfully written, Doctors Without Borders establishes a new bar for those who would cover Médecins Sans Frontières in the future. This book will take its due place as one of the most comprehensive works on MSF.
A commendably reflective work of sociology that, more importantly, tells a remarkable history of care.
Generally interested readers will find Fox's thoughtful and thought-provoking overview ambitious and well worth the effort, while anyone focused on health care and medicine will be deeply fascinated.
A treasured and monumental depiction of MSF’s courageous and persistent commitment to millions of people in distress.
A remarkable story of healing, conflict, and the journey of an organization once dismissed as a bunch of 'medical commandos' [and now] one of the most important health care humanitarian organizations in the world.
Doctors Without Borders: Humanitarian Quests, Impossible Dreams of Médecins Sans Frontières provides detailed insights on the Doctors Without Borders medical ideals and culture... The result is a blend of organizational history and development and observations of the group's struggles to combat third world nation diseases, making for an outstanding social and health history.
The author tells an exquisite story of the organization's origins and challenges... This book, honoring those who provide such important humanitarian assistance, will enrich a wide audience.
The author provides a well written ethnographic account of the often conflictual internal dynamics of inclusion and exclusion among various factions within MSF. This book is original in its scope, taking seriously the opinions and personal history of past and current MSF members, from the more prominent and infamous leaders to veterans of humanitarian aid and newcomers alike.
Sociologist Renée C. Fox has written an eloquent, sensitive, and complex ethnographic profile based on extensive fieldwork. Fox conducted numerous interviews, site visits, and attended a number of major meetings and conferences; she ended her fieldwork at a landmark event, the first meeting of a newly created International General Assembly which also marked MSF's 40th anniversary. She describes her role as an "insider-outsider" combining access to internal information, public documents, and a staff blog. These multiple methods allowed her to become a sensitive yet detached and objective observer of the social relationships and culture of MSF.
The first extensive social scientific description in English of MSF, its origins and action in the field, and its cultural identity.Reaching beyond the history of the organization—the schisms and tensions that it has undergone—the book aims to explore how these tensions are related to the field of operations and to what happens in the field.
How has MSF come to occupy this role as canary in the coalmine, as the embodiment of humanitarian ideals and as a provocative moral force for medical ethics and human rights around the world? This question is answered in Renée Fox’s rich sociological and historical text... A must-read for anyone considering a medical mission abroad or studying humanitarian assistance.
Sociologist Renée C. Fox has written an eloquent, sensitive, and complex ethnographic profile based on extensive fieldwork. Fox conducted numerous interviews and site visits, and attended a number of major meetings and conferences; she ended her fieldwork at a landmark event, the first meeting of a newly created International General Assembly which also marked MSF's 40th anniversary. She describes her role as an "insider-outsider" combining access to internal information, public documents, and a staff blog. These multiple methods allowed her to become a sensitive yet detached and objective observer of the social relationships and culture of MSF.
Over half a million people contribute $10 or $20 to MSF each month... Doctors Without Borders will enlighten them about how hard yet rewarding this work is.
... a must-read for anyone considering a medical mission abroad or studying humanitarian assistance.
Whether you like MSF or not, and whether you already know it or not, Doctors Without Borders provides a refreshing and unusual perspective of this larger-than life organization. Without complacency, but with the candor and attention to detail a social scientist can marshal, Fox takes us backstage where MSFers breathe, agonize, exult, or fulminate to defend a complex and imperfect idea of humanitarian action.
As one of the world’s most insightful and pathbreaking sociologists, Renée Fox has brilliantly captured the historic and contemporary essence of the MSF movement. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand humanitarian action in the twenty-first century.
Doctors Without Borders is an insightful and generous ethnographic account of the Nobel laureate organization, not eluding the dilemmas, quandaries, tensions, and contradictions at the heart of the noble but uncertain task of saving lives and advocating for victims.
Doctors Without Borders is interesting and inspiring. Very well done!
The last forty years have seen an extraordinary rise in humanitarian assistance to those suffering in conflict and emergencies. Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) has been at the centre of this, one of the world’s most admired organisations, yet one constantly seeking to reinvent itself. In this book Renée Fox at once tells the story of MSF, offers a brilliant sociological study of organisational character and change, and analyses the challenges MSF faces working in settings as diverse as Russia and South Africa. This is a book well worth reading.
An extraordinarily insightful study of an extraordinary organization. Renée Fox, one of our country's most distinguished and thoughtful students of medicine, has captured the motives and achievements, as well as the characteristic tensions, of an organization ministering to the sick and dispossessed from Siberia to Cape Town, providing care and bearing witness. Doctors Without Borders contributes significantly to the history and ethnography of social movements—as well as to our understanding of the challenges implicit in shaping moral action in a diversely dismaying world. It deserves to be widely read and enthusiastically reviewed.
About
Book Details
Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x 9
Pages
328
ISBN
9781421416922
Illustration Description
11 halftones, 6 line drawings
Table of Contents
The Quests
Part I
1. Voices from the Field
Part II
2. Origins, Schisms, and Crises
3. "Nobel or Rebel?"
4. MSF Greece Ostracized
5. The Return of MSF Greece
Part III
6. La Mancha
Part IV
7. Struggling with HIV/
The Quests
Part I
1. Voices from the Field
Part II
2. Origins, Schisms, and Crises
3. "Nobel or Rebel?"
4. MSF Greece Ostracized
5. The Return of MSF Greece
Part III
6. La Mancha
Part IV
7. Struggling with HIV/ AIDS
8. In Khayelitsha
9. A "Non-Western Entity" Is Born
Part V
10. Reaching Out to the Homeless and Street Children of Moscow with Olga Shevchenko
11. Confronting TB in Siberian Prisons with Olga Shevchenko
Coda
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Resources
