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Acknowledgments At its inception, my sociological quest to know and understand Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), out of which this book grew, was given intellectual and moral impetus by three inspiring individuals: Willy De Craemer, Jonathan Mann, and Ernest Drucker. Albeit in differing ways, each of them had been involved in firsthand humanitarian action to which he was strongly committed, while remaining keenly aware of the dilemmas it posed, its limitations and imperfections, and the unintended harm it could cause. Willy De Craemer, a fellow sociologist and a Jesuit priest, was the one with whom I had the closest professional and personal relationship. In a missionary capacity, he had been a teacher and the director of a center for sociological research in Congo/Zaïre, where he initiated me into the social and cultural worlds of Africa south of the Sahara, and of the Catholic Church–affiliated personnel who worked there.1 Jonathan Mann was a physician, renowned for having uncovered the existence of an epidemic of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa (from a base in Zaïre), for his international battle (as first director of WHO’s AIDS program) against the pandemic it became, and as a leading figure in linking AIDS and global health with social problems and human rights issues. He was also a founder of the American branch of Doctors of the World (the humanitarian organization that resulted from a schism in Doctors Without Borders).2 We became acquainted through these links, our respective publications, and our Harvard connections. (After his term with WHO he returned to the Harvard School of 1. I have written extensively about Willy De Craemer’s background, professional career, my relationship to him, and my years of research and teaching in Congo/Zaïre (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) in my autobiography, Renée C. Fox, In the Field: A Sociologist’s Journey (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2010). 2. For more details about this schism and the foundation of Médecins du Monde/Doctors of the World, see chap. 2 of this book. 270 Acknowledgments Public Health, where he was director of the International AIDS Center, and of the Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights.) For twenty-five years, the psychologist Ernest Drucker was director of Public Health and Policy Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine’s Montefiore Medical Center in New York City. Throughout his career his policyand human-rights-oriented research, conducted in Africa as well as the United States, has centered on drug addiction, the reduction of drug-related harm, and the relationship between drugs, crime, HIV/AIDS, and “mass incarceration ” (which he regards as an epidemiological, plaguelike phenomenon.)3 In the first phase of my research when I was considering making a comparative study of Doctors Without Borders and Doctors of the World, it was Drucker, at that time a member of the board of Doctors of the World, USA, who arranged for me to become a participant observer in its New York City office. Willy De Craemer died from complications of Parkinson’s Disease in 2005. Jonathan Mann perished in 1998 in a Swissair crash, en route to Geneva to participate in global strategy sessions on HIV/AIDS, sponsored by WHO and the UN. Ernest Drucker, an emeritus professor, is still involved in humanitarian action and advocacy. I shall always be thankful to each of them for encouraging and aiding me to undertake a study of MSF, and for infusing it with added meaning through their example. I am profoundly grateful to the members of MSF for the unreserved access they gave me to their lived experiences within their organization/movement —including to their questions and disputes about the humanitarian action in which they are ardently engaged. They are likely to say there was nothing exceptional about what they willingly shared with me—that it was in keeping with MSF’s culture, its commitment to transparency and critical selfexamination , and its conviction that “ideas matter for action.” Nevertheless, I hope this book will demonstrate to readers how remarkable, and in many ways admirable, these attributes of MSF’s culture are, as well as how vital to the research I was able to conduct. I am especially grateful to members of MSF who have been important teachers , exemplars, providers of key information and documents, and sources of 3. I was introduced to Ernest Drucker by Robert Klitzman, who is presently a professor of clinical psychiatry at the...

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