Below are summaries of some of my current and previous research projects. You can find my publications listed on the research and policy pages.
Power in MSF
In Service of Emergency: Understanding Power and Inequality in MSF
Conceived in 2020 while humanitarian organisations were animated by debates about colonial legacies, racism, and institutional biases, this report examines internal power dynamics within the medical humanitarian association Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). It focuses on Operational Centre Amsterdam, one of five such centres that run MSF’s medical and health programs. It looks at both operational decision-making and daily human relations, and dynamics between staff members as well as the implications for MSF’s relationships with patients and communities.
This study was commissioned by the Manson Unit – part of MSF UK – and undertaken by an independent research team: me, Myfanwy James, Lioba Hirsch, and Molly Naisanga. Research for this study was undertaken in 2021 and 2022. The full report is available alongside summaries of the research on this website: https://msfuk.unbounddocs.com/power-analysis/
Humanitarian reform
The Limits of Humanitarianism: Politics, Crisis, and Reform in the Era of Climate Change
Jointly led with Fernando Espada, this project is a critical engagement with the practices, limits, history and prospects of change in the humanitarian system. It looks at moments of humanitarian reform since the 1970s, in the context of the gradual encounter of humanitarian actors with the crisis generated by climate change.
Efforts to shape the formal humanitarian system – understood as the norms, structures and actors mainly associated with the United Nations, donor states, the Red Cross/Red Crescent, and non-governmental organisations – have been extensive and taken many forms (see some recent examples listed here, proposed here, or questioned here). What we are interested in is not to become part of this reform industry, but to critically analyse it and bring new angles on how and why it functions the way it does.
The project is funded by the Alameda Institute and more information is available here.
Detention of child migrants
Historical Rights and Humanitarian Dilemmas: Caring for Children in Offshore Detention
This project explores how, after a century of work based on the notion of childhood as sacred and outside of politics, the world’s pre-eminent child rights organisation wound up cooperating in the indefinite detention of children. It proposes that immigration detention facilities and other sites of racialised violence reveal the fragility of the universal norms of childhood associated with progress in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Specifically, the project analyses the role of Save the Children Australia in Australian-run detention centres in Papua New Guinea and Nauru from 2012-2015. Australia has been an influential pioneer in the global trend towards detention and criminalisation of asylum seekers and refugees. Save the Children’s offshore operations represent a particularly controversial example of non-governmental organisations working as service providers within this system. Yet this moment remains shadowy and poorly researched, obscured by reticence, censorship and judgement. The project focuses on organisational decision-making and ethics, tracing the successive challenges that arose as Save the Children’s operations expanded and the organisation and its staff came into conflict with both their government employers and their own principles. As the incarceration of asylum-seeker children by democratic countries expands, this project shines a light on the compromises into which humanitarian organisations are drawn when they seek to offer care in such settings.
This project is supported by an independent scholar fellowship from the Independent Social Research Foundation, which is enabling the preparation of a book manuscript. I have published a chapter on this project:
- “The conscience of the island? The NGO moment in Australian offshore detention,” Amidst the Debris: Humanitarianism and the End of Liberal Order (2021), ed. Juliano Fiori, Fernando Espada, Andrea Rigon, Bertrand Taithe, and Rafia Zakaria. Hurst & Company, pp. 83-106.
The rise of radical humanitarianism
Idealism beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism, 1954-1988
The tiers-mondiste (third-worldist) belief in third-world revolution developed at a time when the left-wing landscape in Europe looked barren and the Soviet one hostile. The fascination with the revolutions in Algeria, Cuba, China, and Vietnam, to name only the most arresting examples, manifested itself in theoretical, literary, and cultural forms. Yet revolutionary zeal disintegrated as third-world regimes showed their dictatorial and bloodthirsty colours. At this time, the radical humanitarian model of sans-frontiérisme – which took its name from the pioneering organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) – emerged as an alternative model for engagement with events in the third world. Its success has seen MSF become one of the top five humanitarian organisations worldwide in terms of budget and reach. The ‘Without Borders’ ethos and epithet gained traction in France and abroad, influencing a generation of humanitarian organisations and global debates about humanitarianism and human rights.
Idealism beyond Borders charts the course of two activist movements in France, tiers-mondiste and sans-frontiériste, and the process by which one came to displace the other as the dominant way of approaching suffering and injustice in the third world. It demonstrates how and why the sans-frontiériste movement, before it refashioned international diplomacy, attracted the attention of many of France’s most prestigious intellectuals and influential publications. Idealism beyond Borders is a contribution to the historiography of the post-war transformation of the French intellectual and political landscape and sheds light upon the intellectual origins and evolution of modern French humanitarianism.
Idealism beyond Borders was published by Cambridge University Press in December 2015. It was joint recipient of the International Studies Association Ethics Section Book Prize in 2017. A paperback version came out in 2018. I have also published two related articles – if you cannot access them and would like to, please get in touch.
- “French adventures in solidarity: revolutionary tourists and radical humanitarians,” European Review of History 21:4 (October 2014): 577-95. doi: 10.1080/13507486.2014.933189.
- “Famine, aid, and ideology: the political activism of Médecins Sans Frontières in the 1980s,” French Historical Studies 34:3 (Summer 2011): 529-58. doi: 10.1215/00161071-1259157.