Many Reasons to Intervene: French and British Approaches to Humanitarian Action

In the humanitarian field those we rather mockingly call French doctors seem always to be in the vanguard, the first to arrive in any critical situation. If they hold such a position in modern humanitarian intervention it is because Medecins Sans Frontieres, and its ‘little sister’ Medecins du Monde, have drawn on the experiences of other organizations gradually to develop their particular brand of intervention; France was after all the last to join the group of so-called founder democracies in the humanitarian field. This detailed study of the comparative history of humanitarianism reveals that it was by learning from forms of action devised by agencies in the United States, Great Britain and Switzerland, that MSF, MDM and many others sought to combine relief practices (learnt from the Red Cross) with efforts to mobilize public opinion (using strategies invented by Amnesty International) in the way that they do.

The contributors assess the competing French and Anglo-Saxon models of intervention and propose approaches to humanitarianism for the twenty-first century.