Deterritorialised territories, borderless borders: the new geography of international medical assistance

Abstract

This article examines the phenomenon of international medical assistance to populations in distress from the perspective of the new spatial strategies deployed by medical humanitarian organisations. Taking seriously the ‘borderlessness’ of movements such as Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders, or MSF), the article argues that transnational medical organisations participate in the practice of deterritorialisation. Deterritorialisation means that certain transnational actors now have the ability to intervene below, across and beyond state boundaries. In the case of MSF, going beyond state boundaries is creative of new territorial structures. One such structure is what may be called the ‘space of victimhood’. Under the guise of reaching ‘victims’ the world over, MSF constructs new spaces—humanitarian zones—inside which individuals in distress are identified as ‘victims’, are sorted out, and become recognisable as generalised examples of human drama. This construction of a space of victimhood opens up the possibility for re-appropriations and manipulations by other non-humanitarian actors. Among such actors, one finds global media networks which avidly search for images of victims. By pointing out the potentially non-humanitarian effects of the new spatial arrangements deployed by transnational medical organisations (a phenomenon referred to as ‘transversality’), this article urges international scholars and practitioners to keep a close eye on questions of space and, specifically, on the sociopolitical processes of inclusion and exclusion that such territorial delineations often produce.