As the Ebola outbreak in West Africa continues its dreadful march, Duncan McLean looks at the 600-year-old practice of isolating individuals and communities in order to bring an end to epidemics and assesses the effectiveness of such measures.
The movement of people has featured throughout human history; so substantial is the legacy of migration that the freedom of movement within and across borders was enshrined in article 13 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
The suffering endured by refugees and other exiles in the northern port town of Calais, France, has been the subject of significant media attention in recent months. Renewed interest in the plight of Calais' encamped population began to peak in April 2015, at the same time that the French authorities forcibly closed the largest settlement, situated in woodland adjacent to an active titanium oxide factory. Residents of this settlement were relocated to a nearby segment of sandy grassland that was once both a waste disposal site and a local shooting range.
Read the letter by Caroline Abu Sa'Da and Christine Jamet, a response to the briefing by Welz “Crisis in the Central African Republic and the international response” published in African Affairs (Vol. 113, No. 453, pp. 601-610).
The 2010 reform of the legal regime regulating Palestinians’ access to the labour market in Lebanon ignited a heated debate among Lebanese, Palestinians, and international political actors. This article analyses the advocacy initiatives preceding the reform to answer the following question: what signifiers of Palestinian-ness have Palestinian political entrepreneurs mobilised?
Along with other non-communicable diseases, cancer is now recognised as a major challenge for humanitarian health providers and for those who finance their programmes. The recent Policy Review of cancer treatment requests submitted to UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Exceptional Care Committees (ECC), by Paul Spiegel and colleagues, makes a valuable contribution to a sparse evidence base.
The survey data and the testimonies gathered by MSF teams in Chad and Cameroon highlight the breadth of the violence that the populations experienced both in the CAR and as they fled the country.
Exploring the evolution of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), this book fills a lacuna in literature on the agency. UNRWA and Palestinian Refugees employs recent fieldwork in order to analyse challenges in programmes and service delivery, protection, camp governance, community participation, and camp improvement and reconstruction.
MSF recently asked Somali refugees in Dadaab’s Dagahaley camp about their living conditions and their thoughts about returning to Somalia in the near future. The responses suggest that bad living conditions in the camp are not conducive to wanting to return, despite a widespread belief to the contrary.
The massive and continuing flows of Syrian and Palestinian refugees to Syria’s neighbours have shown the limitations of humanitarian practice and present new challenges for medical and humanitarian interventions.