Humanitarian actors face an increasing politicisation of their work. There is concern among some humanitarians – what some have called the “neutrality elevated”school ¹⁵ – that humanitarian assistance is becoming the policy instrument of choice in situations where Western governments do not wish to engage politically, but morally feel compelled to act. Some even suggest that relief has become the continuation of politics by other means¹⁶. In places such as Sudan and Burundi, humanitarian assistance has come to replace development aid due to a lack of sustainable commitment by the international community – an approach that is typical for long-term, low-intensity conflicts in non-strategic areas of the global south. The “War on Terrorism” is another manifestation of the increasingly political operating environment for humanitarian agencies. One particularly compelling recent example of this was the attempt to win Afghans’ “hearts and minds” through food drops and the deployment of special military units in civilian clothes for bridge building and digging wells. For some agencies, humanitarian assistance contracts offered by USAID in Iraq facilitate war, and so bidding on the contracts would have represented an unacceptable compromise of their organisational principles and values. The main risk of politicised humanitarian assistance lies in fuelling war economies and undermining local coping strategies particularly where the assistance is provided over years and even decades.

Recently there have been a number of attempts – what some have termed the “neutrality abandoned” school¹⁷ – to place conditionality on humanitarian assistance in an effort to modify the political behaviour of a regime or armed group. Examples include the attempt by the US government to tie food aid to political concessions during the 1995 famine in North Korea; the selective provision of aid to opposition-held areas in Serbia (1999); and withholding assistance funds to Sierra Leone (1997) and Afghanistan (1998-2001). Given the universal character of humanitarian assistance, these experiments were highly controversial and proved largely ineffective. There is a growing consensus within the donor community to abstain from such efforts.

What some have called the “third-way humanitarianism” school¹⁸ argues for a stronger role of humanitarian aid in peacebuilding and addressing the root causes of violent conflict. This approach argues that aid agencies should avoid taking sides on the politicisation of humanitarian assistance, and instead make strategic use of their resources to contribute to conflict reduction and peacebuilding.

Depending on one’s perspective then, conflict sensitivity is either key to ensuring humanitarian aid efficacy in an increasingly political operating environment (the “neutrality elevated”and “neutrality abandoned”schools) or synonymous with it (the “third way humanitarianism” school).