Three Acts of Resistance during the 2014–16 West Africa Ebola Epidemic

Frédéric Le Marcis (1, 2) , Luisa Enria (3) , Sharon Abramowitz , Almudena Marí-Sáez (4) , Sylvain Landry B. Faye (5)

1 TransVIHMI - Recherches Translationnelles sur le VIH et les maladies infectieuses endémiques et émergentes
2 TRIANGLE - Triangle : action, discours, pensée politique et économique
3 University of Bath [Bath]
4 RKI - Robert Koch Institute [Berlin]
5 UCAD - Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar [Sénégal]

Community engagement is commonly regarded as a crucial entry point for gaining access and securing trust during humanitarian emergencies. In this article, we present three case studies of community engagement encounters during the West African Ebola outbreak. They represent strategies commonly implemented by the humanitarian response to the epidemic: communication through comités de veille villageois in Guinea, engagement with NGO-affiliated community leadership structures in Liberia and indirect mediation to chiefs in Sierra Leone. These case studies are based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out before, during and after the outbreak by five anthropologists involved in the response to Ebola in diverse capacities. Our goal is to represent and conceptualise the Ebola response as a dynamic interaction between a response apparatus, local populations and intermediaries, with uncertain outcomes that were negotiated over time and in response to changing conditions. Our findings show that community engagement tactics that are based on fixed notions of legitimacy are unable to respond to the fluidity of community response environments during emergencies.

Mots clés: community engagement; ethnography; legitimacy; Ebola

Domaines: Anthropologie sociale et ethnologie

Frédéric Le Marcis, Luisa Enria, Sharon Abramowitz, Almudena Marí-Sáez, Sylvain Landry B. Faye. Three Acts of Resistance during the 2014–16 West Africa Ebola Epidemic. Journal of humanitarian affairs, 2019, 1 (2), pp.23-31. ⟨10.7227/JHA.014⟩. ⟨halshs-02303330⟩