Key findings

• Humanitarian assistance is at risk of becoming an instrument of war – at the local level through the manipulation of aid resources by warlords, at the global level through its instrumentalisation for partisan political interests.
• In some particularly complex situations, external interventions are limited to humanitarian assistance. In the absence of concurrent sustained development or peacebuilding interventions, the potentially negative impact of such humanitarian assistance is far greater – heightening the need for conflict sensitivity.
• Many humanitarian agencies are increasingly aware of the risks of their interventions exacerbating conflict and some have been developing methodologies and mechanisms for addressing this.

Key recommendation for conflict sensitive humanitarian assistance

• Conflict sensitivity can help humanitarian organisations deal with the challenges of politicisation. It involves: politically informed neutrality, a conflict prevention perspective (Do Some Good, Do No Harm), coherence and complementarity (see Chapters 2 and 5).
• Due to the often urgent nature of humanitarian assistance interventions, a solid institutional framework for conflict sensitivity at all stages of the intervention cycle needs to be established in order to formulate contingency plans and respond rapidly to changing circumstances.