Negotiating Medical Aid in Conflict Zones

Doctors Without Borders, also known as MSF, has published a new book entitled Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed – The MSF Experience, which describes how working in conflict zones makes negotiating inevitable if medical treatment is to be administered. This is not dissimilar to the work that SFCG does in the countries where we work, and we think the parallels between our work and that of MSF are interesting.

The book makes the case that there is no such thing as an abstract humanitarian space, but that there is huge responsibility from the aid actors themselves to defend and conquer their own space of work through negotiations, through compromises, through power struggle with authorities intersecting with civil society groups, international organizations, and governments.

Negotiations center on a search for common ground.

An MSF employee says, “You shouldn’t believe in yourself as the bearer of some absolute moral virtue. We have interests, the authorities have interests. And so we have to find common interests between those different parties and groups.”

You can read a recent Voice of America article about the book here.