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Doctors Without Borders: Humanitarian Quests, Impossible Dreams of Médecins Sans Frontières
An intimate portrait of the renowned international humanitarian organization.
Winner of the PROSE Award for Excellence, Sociology and Social Work of the Association of American Publishers
This study of Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) casts new light on the organization’s founding principles, distinctive culture, and inner struggles to realize more fully its “without borders” transnational vision.
Pioneering medical sociologist Renée C. Fox spent nearly twenty years conducting extensive ethnographic research within MSF, a private international medical humanitarian organization that was created in 1971 and awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1999.
With unprecedented access, Fox attended MSF meetings and observed doctors and other workers in the field. She interviewed MSF members and participants and analyzed the content of such documents as communications between MSF staff members within the offices of its various headquarters, communications between headquarters and the field, and transcripts of internal group discussions and meetings. Fox weaves these threads of information into a rich tapestry of the MSF experience that reveals the dual perspectives of an insider and an observer.
The book begins with moving, detailed accounts from the blogs of women and men working for MSF in the field. From there, Fox chronicles the organization’s early history and development, paying special attention to its struggles during the first decades of its existence to clarify and implement its principles. The core of the book is centered on her observations in the field of MSF’s efforts to combat a rampant epidemic of HIV/AIDS in postapartheid South Africa and the organization’s response to two challenges in postsocialist Russia: an enormous surge in homelessness on the streets of Moscow and a massive epidemic of tuberculosis in the penal colonies of Siberia. Fox’s accounts of these crises exemplify MSF’s struggles to provide for thousands of people in need when both the populations and the aid workers are in danger.
Enriched by vivid photographs of MSF operations and by ironic, self-critical cartoons drawn by a member of the Communications Department of MSF France, Doctors Without Borders highlights the bold mission of the renowned international humanitarian organization even as it demonstrates the intrinsic dilemmas of humanitarian action.
1117482339
Doctors Without Borders: Humanitarian Quests, Impossible Dreams of Médecins Sans Frontières
An intimate portrait of the renowned international humanitarian organization.
Winner of the PROSE Award for Excellence, Sociology and Social Work of the Association of American Publishers
This study of Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) casts new light on the organization’s founding principles, distinctive culture, and inner struggles to realize more fully its “without borders” transnational vision.
Pioneering medical sociologist Renée C. Fox spent nearly twenty years conducting extensive ethnographic research within MSF, a private international medical humanitarian organization that was created in 1971 and awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1999.
With unprecedented access, Fox attended MSF meetings and observed doctors and other workers in the field. She interviewed MSF members and participants and analyzed the content of such documents as communications between MSF staff members within the offices of its various headquarters, communications between headquarters and the field, and transcripts of internal group discussions and meetings. Fox weaves these threads of information into a rich tapestry of the MSF experience that reveals the dual perspectives of an insider and an observer.
The book begins with moving, detailed accounts from the blogs of women and men working for MSF in the field. From there, Fox chronicles the organization’s early history and development, paying special attention to its struggles during the first decades of its existence to clarify and implement its principles. The core of the book is centered on her observations in the field of MSF’s efforts to combat a rampant epidemic of HIV/AIDS in postapartheid South Africa and the organization’s response to two challenges in postsocialist Russia: an enormous surge in homelessness on the streets of Moscow and a massive epidemic of tuberculosis in the penal colonies of Siberia. Fox’s accounts of these crises exemplify MSF’s struggles to provide for thousands of people in need when both the populations and the aid workers are in danger.
Enriched by vivid photographs of MSF operations and by ironic, self-critical cartoons drawn by a member of the Communications Department of MSF France, Doctors Without Borders highlights the bold mission of the renowned international humanitarian organization even as it demonstrates the intrinsic dilemmas of humanitarian action.
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Doctors Without Borders: Humanitarian Quests, Impossible Dreams of Médecins Sans Frontières
An intimate portrait of the renowned international humanitarian organization.
Winner of the PROSE Award for Excellence, Sociology and Social Work of the Association of American Publishers
This study of Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) casts new light on the organization’s founding principles, distinctive culture, and inner struggles to realize more fully its “without borders” transnational vision.
Pioneering medical sociologist Renée C. Fox spent nearly twenty years conducting extensive ethnographic research within MSF, a private international medical humanitarian organization that was created in 1971 and awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1999.
With unprecedented access, Fox attended MSF meetings and observed doctors and other workers in the field. She interviewed MSF members and participants and analyzed the content of such documents as communications between MSF staff members within the offices of its various headquarters, communications between headquarters and the field, and transcripts of internal group discussions and meetings. Fox weaves these threads of information into a rich tapestry of the MSF experience that reveals the dual perspectives of an insider and an observer.
The book begins with moving, detailed accounts from the blogs of women and men working for MSF in the field. From there, Fox chronicles the organization’s early history and development, paying special attention to its struggles during the first decades of its existence to clarify and implement its principles. The core of the book is centered on her observations in the field of MSF’s efforts to combat a rampant epidemic of HIV/AIDS in postapartheid South Africa and the organization’s response to two challenges in postsocialist Russia: an enormous surge in homelessness on the streets of Moscow and a massive epidemic of tuberculosis in the penal colonies of Siberia. Fox’s accounts of these crises exemplify MSF’s struggles to provide for thousands of people in need when both the populations and the aid workers are in danger.
Enriched by vivid photographs of MSF operations and by ironic, self-critical cartoons drawn by a member of the Communications Department of MSF France, Doctors Without Borders highlights the bold mission of the renowned international humanitarian organization even as it demonstrates the intrinsic dilemmas of humanitarian action.
Renée C. Fox is the Annenberg Professor Emerita of the Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Experiment Perilous: Physicians and Patients Facing the Unknown, In the Belgian Château: The Spirit and Culture of a European Society in an Age of Change, and In the Field: A Sociologist's Journey and the coauthor of The Courage to Fail: A Social View of Organ Transplants and Dialysis and Observing Bioethics
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/ 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
What People are Saying About This
Craig Calhoun
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.
Didier Fassin
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.
Professor Peter Piot
Doctors Without Borders by Renee C. Fox is interesting and inspiring. Very well done!
From the Publisher
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.—James Orbinski, MSF International Council President 1998–2001
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.—Didier Fassin, author of Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present
Doctors Without Borders is interesting and inspiring. Very well done!—Peter Piot, Director, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
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.—Craig Calhoun, Director and President, London School of Economics and Political Science
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.—Charles E. Rosenberg, Professor of the History of Science and the Ernest E. Monrad Professor in the Social Sciences, Harvard University
Charles E. Rosenberg
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.
Peter Piot
Doctors Without Borders is interesting and inspiring. Very well done!
James Orbinski
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.
