Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières

Negotiations Revealed

Humanitarian negotiations are life-and-death issues for people in need, but they also raise troubling political and ethical dilemmas for the organizations that are engaged in them. In the book Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience, published by Columbia University Press, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) takes a critical look at how its teams have negotiated to gain access to people in urgent need of lifesaving medical assistance in the 40 years since MSF was founded, including recent case studies from Somalia, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar.
On January 31, 2012, MSF hosted a live online discussion of these issues featuring several experienced MSF aid workers, who shared their first-hand experiences from past assignments. They described the often complicated process of negotiating with governments, armed groups, public health officials, international actors, community leaders, and local officials; as well as the struggle to define what compromises are acceptable in order to run programs in crisis zones.


http://youtu.be/gcs32BwwL7A