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| >> Foreign Aid in the National Interest >> Chapter 5 >> New Humanitarian Actors |
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Jump to Chapter 5 Sections:
Lacking support from superpowers, armed groups have turned to exploiting the natural resources around them and stripping civilian assets to finance their operations.
Complex emergencies, complex responsesHumanitarian relief workers often refer to conflict settings as complex humanitarian emergencies, defined as internal conflicts with large-scale displacement of people; fragile or failing political, economic and social institutions; random and systematic violence against non-combatants; infrastructure collapse, widespread lawlessness and interrupted food production and trade. This term reflects the human suffering caused by these conflicts though the emergencies are, at heart, political, with real solutions lying outside the humanitarian realm. The complexity has as much to do with the nature of responses as with the intricacies of con- flicts. Responses in war settings were once the responsibility of the International Committee of the Red Cross, as the custodian of the 1949 Geneva Convention and 1977 Additional Protocols. But today UN agencies, NGOs, and a range of military actors are on the scene. The relationships within and between these entities differ in each case, and coordination among them has become more difficult with the growing number and type of actors. page 2 |
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