Humanitarian Action and Sustaining Peace

While humanitarian action was traditionally designed to be a short-term emergency response, this is increasingly perceived as inaccurate and even undesirable. Humanitarian actors have acknowledged a responsibility to work toward bridging the “humanitarian-development divide” and not to overlook the nexus between addressing and reducing humanitarian needs and building the foundations for sustaining peace.

This issue brief explores how principled humanitarian action, in synergy with other types of responses and initiatives, can help create the conditions for self-sustaining peace by being conflict-sensitive, leveraging local actors and capacities, and providing context-specific and sustainable aid. It also looks at why humanitarian action can be seen as a building block for peace by providing basic services, reducing tensions, creating a space for dialogue, and putting people’s humanity at the center of operations