More than 200 million people live today in contested territories – places where the authority of the state is challenged outright and armed groups exercise full or fluid control. This number has risen by 30 million since 2021. These are not distant statistics; each figure represents a person living in the shadow of competing powers, making difficult choices in an almost impossible environment.
How do people navigate the presence of multiple, often competing, armed actors? Is dignity found in defiance, or safety in uneasy compliance? How do families secure food, water or medical care when neither the state nor armed groups are able or willing to provide basic services? And, crucially, what can humanitarian actors do to better protect and assist those caught in these fractured landscapes?
In this post, and drawing on recently published research in Cameroon, Iraq and the Philippines, Arjun Claire, Senior Policy Adviser at the ICRC, and Matthew Bamber-Zryd, the ICRC’s Adviser on Armed Groups, offer five insights to help strengthen humanitarian responses in contested territories – insights rooted in the lived realities of the people who navigate them every day.
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More than 200 million people live today in contested territories – places where the authority of the state is challenged outright and armed groups exercise full or fluid control. This number has risen by 30 million since 2021. These are not distant statistics; each figure represents a person living in the shadow of competing powers, making difficult choices in an almost impossible environment.
How do people navigate the presence of multiple, often competing, armed actors? Is dignity found in defiance, or safety in uneasy compliance? How do families secure food, water or medical care when neither the state nor armed groups are able or willing to provide basic services? And, crucially, what can humanitarian actors do to better protect and assist those caught in these fractured landscapes?
In this post, and drawing on recently published research in Cameroon, Iraq and the Philippines, Arjun Claire, Senior Policy Adviser at the ICRC, and Matthew Bamber-Zryd, the ICRC’s Adviser on Armed Groups, offer five insights to help strengthen humanitarian responses in contested territories – insights rooted in the lived realities of the people who navigate them every day.
Dialogue, dignity, and the humanitarian contribution to peace
ICRC Humanitarian Law and Policy Blog
15 minutes 42 seconds
1 month ago
Dialogue, dignity, and the humanitarian contribution to peace
The number of conflicts continues to rise – with the ICRC currently classifying some 130 armed conflicts worldwide – while at the same time, they are rarely brought to an end. The human suffering they cause is devastating and hard to comprehend. But wars are not inevitable – and the best way to end the suffering they cause is to end conflicts or prevent them from breaking out in the first place. In the absence of effective efforts to find sustainable political solutions, humanitarian organizations like the ICRC are often left to manage the suffering caused by these conflicts, which affect civilians most of all. Political will to reinvest in international cooperation, conflict prevention, and resolution is urgently needed. While humanitarian action cannot substitute for political action, humanitarian actors can contribute to the prospects for peace.
In this post, ICRC Policy Advisers Ariana Lopes Morey and Avigail Shai outline key reflections on the ICRC’s direct and indirect contributions to an environment conducive to peace. Drawing on case studies and other research, they identify three primary areas of the ICRC’s humanitarian action – its work with communities, in dialogue with parties to conflict and other influential actors, and in building respect for human dignity through laws, norms and institutions – which can strengthen prospects for peace. While focused on the ICRC’s own work, many of these reflections can apply more broadly to other organizations who strive to address the humanitarian impacts of conflict on people.
ICRC Humanitarian Law and Policy Blog
More than 200 million people live today in contested territories – places where the authority of the state is challenged outright and armed groups exercise full or fluid control. This number has risen by 30 million since 2021. These are not distant statistics; each figure represents a person living in the shadow of competing powers, making difficult choices in an almost impossible environment.
How do people navigate the presence of multiple, often competing, armed actors? Is dignity found in defiance, or safety in uneasy compliance? How do families secure food, water or medical care when neither the state nor armed groups are able or willing to provide basic services? And, crucially, what can humanitarian actors do to better protect and assist those caught in these fractured landscapes?
In this post, and drawing on recently published research in Cameroon, Iraq and the Philippines, Arjun Claire, Senior Policy Adviser at the ICRC, and Matthew Bamber-Zryd, the ICRC’s Adviser on Armed Groups, offer five insights to help strengthen humanitarian responses in contested territories – insights rooted in the lived realities of the people who navigate them every day.
