Health in the service of state-building in fragile and conflict affected contexts: an additional challenge in the medical-humanitarian environment.

Background: Global health policy and development aid trends also affect humanitarian health work. Reconstruction, rehabilitation and development initiatives start increasingly earlier after crisis, unleashing tensions between development and humanitarian paradigms. Recently, development aid shows specific interest in contexts affected by conflict and fragility, with increasing expectations for health interventions to demonstrate transformative potential, including towards more resilient health systems as a contribution to state-building agendas.

Changing tracks as situations change: humanitarian and health response along the Liberia-Côte d'Ivoire border.

In recent years, protracted crises and fragile post-conflict settings have challenged the co-existence, and even the linear continuum, of relief and development aid. Forced migration has tested humanitarian and development paradigms where sudden-onset emergencies, violence and displacement arise alongside ongoing development work. Drawing on Médecins Sans Frontières interventions in the region from December 2010 to May 2011, this paper examines aid and healthcare responses to displacement in Côte d'Ivoire and Liberia; it focuses on challenges to the maintenance of preparedness for such foreseeable emergencies and to adaptation in response to changing situations of displacement and insecurity.

Do we need a world health insurance to realise the right to health?

There has been growing recognition in the international community that health should be considered a human right. Much less attention has been paid, however, to the ensuing legal obligation to provide international assistance.

Common fate, different experience: gender-specific aspects of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1917.

Violence against women was a central feature of the Armenian Genocide. Even before the mass killings, sexual humiliation was used to intimidate the Armenian community. After the murder of the Armenian leadership and men of military age, Ottoman authorities and Ittihadist supporters deported surviving Armenians from Anatolia into the Syrian desert.