Trends and challenges in humanitarian civil–military coordination

In crisis contexts, principled civil–military coordination is critical to protecting humanitarian principles and, therefore, ensuring an effective humanitarian response. However, in recent years it has faced a number of major and often interconnected challenges, including increasingly integrated international interventions in fragile and conflict-affected states, the growth in the frequency and scale of natural disasters and the rapid proliferation of ‘humanitarian’ actors, including NGOs, not-for- profit organisations and the private sector. Despite the fact that humanitarian organisations and militaries increasingly operate in the same environments there is limited analysis in existing literature of how their relationship functions in practice. In particular, there is little analysis of how the relationship has been affected, in operational terms, by the changing nature of conflicts and the development of more integrated approaches to international interventions. Rather, debates about civil–military coordination have tended to focus on conceptual issues and have been primarily concerned with questions of principle, with less analysis and debate on how the relationship works on a practical level, and more importantly how this relationship impacts on humanitarian outcomes for populations in need of humanitarian assistance and protection.
This literature review is part of an HPG project entitled ‘Civil– Military Coordination: The Search for Common Ground’. This two-year research and public affairs project explores how recent global developments have affected the relationship between military and humanitarian actors, with the aim of facilitating more effective and principled collaboration to support better humanitarian outcomes for crisis-affected populations. This paper identifies key trends emerging from the literature on civil–military coordination in conflicts and natural disasters. It deals with the interaction between international humanitarian and international or foreign military actors operating in crisis contexts, and offers some reflections on the relationship between national military actors and the international humanitarian community.
The paper is in three parts. The first section explores ongoing or emerging trends and challenges in the relationship between humanitarian and military actors broadly, charting the rise of international military engagement in humanitarian action and the overarching problems this poses to coordination with international humanitarian actors. Building on this discussion, the second section outlines aspects of the relationship that are specific to natural disaster contexts, while the third section explores civil–military coordination in relation to the protection of civilians. Finally, the paper offers some preliminary conclusions towards improving civil– military coordination in crisis contexts.