Can Humanitarian Action Remain Principled in Challenging Times? By Emily Defina - The Cove
The conflict environment is undergoing considerable and rapid change. More armed groups have emerged in the past six years than in the entire previous six decades. Warfare is being conducted in urban centres among civilian populations who represent the most frequent casualties. Ongoing violations of the law, sometimes as part of a deliberate military strategy, are generating an exponential growth in humanitarian needs whilst simultaneously making work difficult for humanitarian actors. Although we’ve seen a decrease in the number of international conflicts waged directly between State parties, internal and protracted situations of long-term violence continue to rise. The conflicts in which the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) operates are increasingly long-term, fragmented and complicated. As a humanitarian organisation originally created to respond to emergencies, we have now been on the ground for an average of 36 years in our ten largest operations. Changing dynamics of violence have brought ICRC delegates closer and closer to the fighting, and made their working conditions ever more dangerous. These tensions put pressure on our traditional ways of working as a neutral, independent and impartial actor…