A01=Maria Cullen
Author_Maria Cullen
Category=JKSR
Category=JPS
Category=NH
Cold War
Development
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Famine
forthcoming
Global South
Human Rights
Humanitarianism
Medicalisation
NGOs
Post-colonialism
Refugees
Product details
- ISBN 9781526187215
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 15 Sep 2026
- Publisher: Manchester University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Oxfam and MSF clashed over the meaning of ethical humanitarian action and the relevance of human rights to their work during the Cold War. To understand why, this book compares how the NGOs’ identities were forged within specific political cultures in Britain and France. While MSF gave voice to the anti-totalitarian convictions of disillusioned ex-communists, Oxfam’s members had a less ideologically charged background and gravitated towards criticism of Western realpolitik, leading the NGO to engage differently with leftist actors in negotiating access to suffering populations in the Global South. Across three case-studies – post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia and displacement in Thailand, the Salvadoran civil war and refugees in Honduras, and the Ethiopian famine – this book demonstrates that the NGOs’ interactions with refugees, civilians and states are best understood when contextualised within the national civil societies and social movements they emerged from.
Maria Cullen is Postdoctoral Research Associate on the European Research Council project 'Solidarity, Sovereignty, and Sanctuary on the Seas: A Global History of Boat Refugees since the 1940s' (SOS) at University College Dublin, and an affiliate of the ‘Developing Humanitarian Medicine’ project, supported by the Wellcome Trust at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, University of Manchester.
