Medical Humanitarianism

Medical Humanitarianism provides comparative ethnographies of the moral, practical, and policy implications of modern medical humanitarian practice. It offers twelve vivid case studies that challenge readers to reach a more critical and compassionate understanding of humanitarian assistance.

Medical humanitarianism—medical and other health-related initiatives undertaken in conditions born of conflict, neglect, or disaster —has a prominent and growing presence in international development, global health, and human security interventions. Medical Humanitarianism: Ethnographies of Practice features twelve essays that fold back the curtains on the individual experiences, institutional practices, and cultural forces that shape humanitarian practice. Contributors offer vivid and often dramatic insights into the experiences of local humanitarian workers in the Afghan-Pakistan border areas, national doctors coping with influxes of foreign humanitarian volunteers in Haiti, military doctors working for the British Army in Iraq and Afghanistan, and human rights-oriented volunteers within the Israeli medical bureaucracy. They analyze our contested understanding of lethal violence in Darfur, food crises responses in Niger, humanitarian knowledge in Ugandan IDP camps, and humanitarian departures in Liberia. They depict the local dynamics of healthcare delivery work to alleviate human suffering in Somali areas of Ethiopia, the emergency metaphors of global health campaigns from Ghana to war-torn Sudan, the fraught negotiations of humanitarians with strong state institutions in Indonesia, and the ambiguous character of research ethics espoused by missions in Sierra Leone. In providing well-grounded case studies, Medical Humanitarianism will engage both scholars and practitioners working at the interface of humanitarian medicine, global health interventions, and the social sciences. They challenge the reader to reach a more critical and compassionate understanding of humanitarian assistance. Contributors: Sharon Abramowitz, Tim Allen, Ilil Benjamin, Lauren Carruth, Mary Jo DelVecchio-Good, Alex de Waal, Byron J. Good, Stuart Gordon, Jesse Hession Grayman, Jean-Hervé Jézéquel, Peter Locke, Amy Moran-Thomas, Patricia Omidian, Catherine Panter-Brick, Peter Piot, Peter Redfield, Laura Wagner.

The pressure of climate change, environmental degradation, and urbanisation, as well as the widening of socio- economic disparities have rendered the global population increasingly vulnerable to the impact of natural disasters. With a primary focus on medical and public health humanitarian response to disasters, Public Health Humanitarian Responses to Natural Disasters provides a timely critical analysis of public health responses to natural disasters. Using a number of case studies and examples of innovative disaster response measures developed by international agencies and stakeholders, this book illustrates how theoretical understanding of public health issues can be practically applied in the context of humanitarian relief response. Starting with an introduction to public health principles within the context of medical and public health disaster and humanitarian response, the book goes on to explore key trends, threats and challenges in contemporary disaster medical response. This book provides a comprehensive overview of an emergent discipline and offers a unique multidisciplinary perspective across a range of relevant topics including the concepts of disaster preparedness and resilience, and key challenges in human health needs for the twenty-first century. This book will be of interest to students of public health, disaster and emergency medicine and development studies, as well as to development and medical practitioners working within NGOs, development agencies, health authorities and public administration.

This book seeks to define the field of humanitarian medicine. It gathers new and previously-published articles and speeches that set out the principles of humanitarian medicine, starting with the idea of health as a human right, and examining topics such as quality of life, torture, and nuclear conflict. The book takes a historical view and its contributors include Nobel laureates Kofi Annan and Joseph Rotblat.

Humanitarianism: Keywords is a comprehensive dictionary designed as a compass for navigating the conceptual universe of humanitarianism. It is an intuitive toolkit to map contemporary humanitarianism and to explore its current and future articulations. The dictionary serves a broad readership of practitioners, students, and researchers by providing informed access to the extensive humanitarian vocabulary.

The field of humanitarianism is characterised by profound uncertainty, by a constant need to respond to the unpredictable, and by concepts and practices that often defy simple or straightforward explanation. Humanitarians often find themselves not just engaged in the pursuit of effective action, but also in a quest for meaning. That is the starting point for this book. Humanitarian action has in recent years confronted geopolitical challenges that have upended much of its conventional modus operandi and presented threats to its foundational assumptions and legal frameworks. The critical interrogation of the purpose, practice and future of humanitarian action has yielded a rich new field of enquiry, humanitarian studies, and many thoughtful books, articles and reports. So, the question arose as to the most useful way to provide a critical overview that might serve to bring some definitional clarity as well as analytical rigor to the waves of critique and shifting sands of humanitarian action. Humanitarianism: A Dictionary of Concepts provides an authoritative analysis that attempts to rethink, rather than merely problematize or define the issues at stake in contemporary humanitarian debates. It is an important moment to do so. Just about every tenet of humanitarianism is currently open to question as never before.

The Oxford Handbook of Humanitarian Medicine is a practical guide covering all aspects of the provision of care in humanitarian situations and complex emergencies. It includes evidence-based clinical guidance, aimed specifically at resource limited situations, as well as essential non-clinical information relevant for people working in field operations and development. The handbook provides clear recommendations, from the experts, on the unique challenges faced by health providers in humanitarian settings including clinical presentations for which conventional medical training offers little preparation. It provides guidance for syndromic management approaches, and includes practical guidance on the integration of context specific mental health care. The handbook goes beyond the clinical domain, however, and also provides detailed information on the contextual issues involved in humanitarian operations, including health systems design, priorities in displacement, security and logistics. It outlines the underlying drivers at play in humanitarian settings, including economics, gender based inequities, and violence, guiding the reader through the epidemiological approaches in varied scenarios. It details the relevance of international law, and its practical application in complex emergencies, and covers the changing picture of humanitarian operations, with increasingly complicated and chaotic contexts and the escalation of violence against humanitarian providers and facility. The Oxford Handbook of Humanitarian Medicine draws on the accumulated experience of humanitarian practitioners from a variety of disciplines and contexts to provide an easily accessible source of information to guide the reader through the complicated scenarios found in humanitarian settings.

A comprehensive, best practices resource for public health and healthcare practitioners and students interested in humanitarian emergencies.