Humanitarian Exchange articles tagged:Conflict & insecurity

In May 2009, the government of Pakistan launched an offensive against the Taliban in Swat, prompting the world’s fastest and largest displacement crisis in over a decade. Over 2.6 million people were uprooted in as little as three weeks. From the outset, it was clear that protection concerns would play a considerable role. Areas of conflict were inaccessible, most of those fleeing were women and children and the vast majority of the displaced stayed in informal camps or host community settings, rather than the purpose-built formal camps. Many IDPs, therefore, remained hidden, unable to access services, unaware of their rights…

People living in conflict-affected areas of Karen State in south-eastern Burma rely on courageous and ingenious, but also often harmful, self-protection strategies. Protection stemming from international norms and agents is largely absent for this population. The ‘Local to Global Protection’ (L2GP) project explores how people living in areas affected by natural disaster and armed conflict understand ‘protection’ – what they value, how they go about protecting themselves, their families and their communities and how they view the roles of other stakeholders. Since the Rwanda crisis in 1994, protection has increasingly been debated by aid agencies, which have sought to incorporate…

  In the span of a few months last spring, Pakistan witnessed one of the gravest internal displacement crises of the last two decades. Beginning in early May, each week hundreds of thousands of people streamed out of the districts of Swat, Buner and Dir into neighbouring lowland areas, driven from their homes by a sweeping military campaign against the Taliban. They joined over half a million already displaced in late 2008 by a similar campaign in the northern tribal agencies of Bajaur and Mohmand. At the height of the crisis, nearly three million people sought shelter in host communities…

In recent years, developing national capacity and building effective partnerships with national and local actors have moved up the humanitarian policy agenda. Yet the rhetoric around sustainability and local ownership rarely reflects operational practice on the ground, making it difficult to identify not only the obstacles to such initiatives, but also the factors that enable their progress. Protracted emergencies raise a particular set of issues about how best to support national and local priorities in the transition from international to national and local aid coordination structures. Drawing on HPG research carried out in Gulu and Pader districts in Northern Uganda…

The Humanitarian Reform (HR) process, initiated three years ago in Colombia, has significantly improved the quality of humanitarian coordination and response. Although much is still to be done to fully consolidate the reform, Colombia has made great progress towards its ultimate objective, which is ‘to improve the effectiveness of humanitarian response by ensuring greater predictability, accountability and partnership; and to reach more beneficiaries, with more comprehensive needs-based relief and protection, in a more effective and timely manner’.[1]   Why Colombia? Back in 2006, a number of reasons for selecting Colombia as one of the reform’s roll-out countries were considered. First…

At 45 years and counting, Colombia’s internal armed conflict is one of the longest in recent history. Its consequences are dire. Summary executions, threats, the forced recruitment of children, hostage-taking, sexual violence and the use of anti-personnel mines have all had serious humanitarian costs, especially during the past 20 or so years. The conflict has also produced one of the world’s largest populations of displaced civilians. According to government and civil society figures, between three and four million people have been forced to flee their homes due to threats, armed clashes and forced recruitment.  The ICRC and ‘humanitarian space’ The…

Political instability and violence have massive impacts on the health of affected populations. Studies show that more people die of treatable diseases during conflict than die from conflict-related injuries. This is because the already poor state of healthcare facilities is often further degraded, to the point where diseases that require only basic interventions – such as malaria or diarrhoea – cannot be cured. Human African trypanosomiasis (HAT) – or Sleeping Sickness, as it is more commonly known – is a particularly problematic disease. It tends to surge during conflict, unlike malaria or diarrhoea it demands difficult diagnostics and treatment and…

One in every six people on the planet currently experiences the kind of living conditions depicted in the recent film Slumdog Millionaire, set in the sprawling slums of Mumbai. Forecasts by UN Habitat and others suggest that slum communities like those shown in the film will double in size to two billion people by 2025, accounting for one in four of the world’s population, making slums the fastest-growing form of human settlement and a key facet of global urbanisation. With urban centres projected to double in size to four billion people by 2025, the equivalent of a city of nearly…

In the two decades prior to President Alvaro Uribe’s election in 2001, illicit crop production in Colombia grew from 3,500 to 144,000 hectares, representing an annual increase of 25.6%, with Colombia producing more than 70% of the world’s cocaine. This trend was coupled with a worsening of the armed conflict, which according to Uribe was due to guerrillas’ involvement in the drug trade. Drug-trafficking was deemed to constitute one of the main sources of funding for Colombia’s guerrilla groups; according to government figures, between 1991 and 1996 $470 million was raised from the illegal sale of narcotics, representing 41% of…

Colombia is in the throes of one of the world’s largest crises of internal displacement. Since the mid-1990s, more than 3.2 million people have been displaced. On average, between 2000 and 2009 300,000 people a year fled in search of protection. In 2008, 294,000 left their places of residence. In late 2008, the government estimated that nearly 40,000 households (176,000 people) had returned to their places of origin with the accompaniment of the authorities.  The official Information System on the Displaced Population in Colombia is one of the most highly developed such systems in the world (www.accionsocial.gov.co). However, it does…