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’, transformed by actors and their interactions ( Long and Long, 1992 : 35). Too often, ‘Aidland’ is seen as an exclusionary ‘bubble of northern-based’ expatriates ( Harrison, 2013 ), overlooking the significance of locally based aid workers who are intricately interwoven with local politics. Local staff must balance their embeddedness ‘in the field’ with their professional position ( Redfield, 2012 ; Crombé and Kruper, 2019 ), while institutional structures often reproduce inequalities between ‘national’ and ‘international’ staff, thereby reflecting broader structures of
, guidelines and best practices, and managed by their own professional staff. That said, security strategies are often different – and frequently less comprehensive – for national staff as compared with expatriate staff ( Beerli, 2018 ; Stoddard et al. , 2011 ). Even the categories of ‘national’ and ‘expatriate’ staff encompass a range of sub-categories across which there is variation in security strategies. Likewise, under the rubric of civilian protection, different measures
conflict in South Sudan as well as MSF’s operational decisions, not least the withdrawal of international teams from the areas under attack. The absence of expatriate witnesses from the most violent events in the situations reviewed here highlights the need to combine and contrast institutional and academic sources with direct testimonies from local MSF personnel and residents – voices that are rarely heard in security analyses. This attention to local experiences and
measures and contingency plans for a possible evacuation or lockdown situation; a one- to two-hour awareness-raising session on security for all volunteers leaving on mission during their departure preparation; and, most importantly, a kidnapping risk-management policy. That policy was designed and put in place after two expatriates were abducted in Somalia in the fall of 2008. It required identifying the kidnapping risk in each intervention zone; a specific briefing for
Qabassin, neither the Syrians nor MSF’s expatriate staff were directly affected by ISIL’s seizure of power, which changed very little in the day-to-day lives and work of MSF’s teams – although, in the first brief discussions with them, ISIL’s representatives made no secret of their totalitarian intentions. Moreover, since September 2013, ISIL propaganda in north-west Syria had been accusing foreign doctors of being enemy spies – a ‘status’ that until then had been reserved for
l’expatriation française en Centrafrique’ ( Thèse 64 en sciences sociales, Université de Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis ). Brandt , C. O. and De Herdt , T. ( 2019 ), ‘On the Political Economy of Data Collection: Lessons from the Unaccomplished Population Census (Democratic Republic of
was burning when they arrived there. And the team included expatriates who I’ve talked to. Their faces changed. They had no idea. They hadn’t been out of Khartoum, all of those guys. It added quite a bit of credibility. This was an eyewitness account. VG: Nowadays, it’s interesting to note that virtual reality is considered as ‘the ultimate empathy machine’. But why do we always focus on positive emotions? Advocacy is about pointing the finger to what doesn’t work, so it involves negative emotions: guilt, shame, blame, or outrage – you mentioned it as
previously in the area I was intervening, to compare the scale of the disasters, etc. I managed to retrieve few documents from previous expatriates, whom I contacted by mail through my personal network. But it is primarily thanks to key Malawian staff, who had kept operational documents on their personal hard drives and who remembered the mission, that I managed to reconstitute a little of the history of previous interventions. Institutional memory is fleeting in MSF. There was no policy on archiving
trainings are also beginning to cover more ‘soft’ skills, with sexual violence awareness sessions often included alongside these, but this still maintains a division between it and ‘hard’ threats like firearms and explosives. 40 With limited exceptions, HEAT trainings seem to ignore that for aid workers that do not fit the romantic aid worker ideal (cis-gendered, heterosexual, male, white, expatriate), the fortified compound can be as dangerous, if not more, than
the gap left by the withdrawal of the government’s Ministry of Health from non-government-controlled Syria ( Ekzayez, 2018 ). Concomitant with the formation of these governance structures locally, diaspora Syrian healthcare workers developed Syrian NGOs in response to the Syrian conflict. The Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), Syrian Expatriate Medical Society (SEMA) and the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations (UOSSM), among other NGOs, shaped a substantial part of the international response to the Syrian conflict. International NGOs were able to