A Nexus critique of Humanitarian Protection

If the Triple or Humanitarian-Development-Peace (HDP) Nexus were not confounding enough for humanitarian operations, think about our sector’s most misunderstood cluster, humanitarian protection, which has long remained shrouded in conceptual fog.  Even after a decade of the UN’s mainstreaming of humanitarian protection, its 2014 Independent Whole of System Review of Protection in the Context of Humanitarian Action concluded that ‘the widespread perspective among humanitarians [is] that they do not have a role to play in countering abusive or violent behaviour even when political and military strategies and tactics pose the biggest threat to life’ (Niland et al., p. 27).

The Review’s finding suggested a pervasive sectoral malaise with the practice of protection. Humanitarian protection thus struggles against a profound if not foundational weakness, one exacerbated by more ‘mundane’ trends such as the decline of multilateralism, the progressive (non-Western) pluralism of the sector, and the consistent weakening of the sector’s rights-based approach.  The proposition here is that the HDP Nexus offers a rare means for humanitarians to think differently about their work in general, and about protection in particular. 

Thus far, however, humanitarian protection’s (scant) Nexus engagement marks a missed opportunity, seemingly bogged down in a discussion of how to adjust the status quo. For example, a year ago PHAP held a webinar to unpack this vital subject, with the promising (if not somewhat clunky) title of The future of protection in the nexus: The role of the Global Protection Cluster and humanitarian protection in the humanitarian-development-peace-security nexus.[1]  Aside from the ICRC’s contributions, I detected zero evidence of humanitarian protection leadership looking differently at the concept of humanitarian protection.  Rather, the conversation remained embedded in the substantial barriers to nexus praxis, such as coordination. 

The literature remains even thinner than the conversation.  Damian Lilly has produced (for ODI’s Humanitarian Practice Network) a relatively comprehensive and discerning overview of how the HDP Nexus affects humanitarian protection. The discussion focusses on the nexus as a policy initiative, and hence generates more of an updating exercise than a rethink.  His paper usefully examines the challenge to humanitarian protection of an overt or institutional linkage with development and peace actors; and then proposes ways forward in dealing with issues such as collective outcomes, program funding, joined up planning, and so forth. The essential yet less ‘useful’ question remains:  What can the HDP Nexus show us about the nature of humanitarian protection?

My own discussion paper on the Triple Nexus, published earlier this year by CHA Berlin, mostly traffics in the less useful.  It fleshes out the discussion obviated by our preoccupation with the pragmatic challenges of linking together three antagonistic, siloed sectors.  Moving beyond the issue of a tri-sectoral organigram, I believe the Nexus should be used to undermine the humanitarian sector’s inadequate, sequestered thinking. It can do this by helping us to better understand both the needs of people and the (inadvertent) consequences of humanitarian programming.  And then the real goal – to change how we see ourselves. The need for such a new gaze?  I would place humanitarian protection near the front of the queue.  Yet – mea culpa — my paper largely avoids the topic.  So now, a first correction of that mistake.

The HDP Nexus presents humanitarians with two can-openers for their tin-walled silo – looking at it (critically) through the lens of development and through the lens of peace (D & P). In their October conference Triple Nexus in Practice – What about Peace? CHA Berlin allowed space for making a few first cuts in the protection can (see the 30-minute conversation between Florian Westphal and me at #4 on the playlist).  What did that conversation yield?

Protection activities form a humanitarian response to those exercising power in such a way as to harm human dignity (see also the full discussion paper). Yet even the best of humanitarian work simultaneously brings negative consequences for peace, development and human dignity.  Why is it so easy to criticise powerful dictators and yet pay no attention to the exercise of power by the sector? Humanitarians may be excused if these are outbalanced or rendered invisible in the heat of emergency response, and yet we same humanitarians should be held accountable when this outbalancing or invisibility stretches on for decades of protracted crisis.  Hopefully, balance and visibility will be enhanced by ‘nexus-thinking’ that drags the sector (kicking and screaming) to the mirror.  What might this look like for protection?

  • The humanitarian sector has a problem with context. As some of the earlier panels from CHA’s conference described, the level of context blindness displayed by international humanitarian interventions can be staggering.  This cannot surprise us so much as our complacency given the apparent complexity of conflict and context, and yet along that dark road of uncertainty, so full of known and unknown unknowns, we feel it imperative (if not virtuous) to publish highly contentious reports on indiscriminate and discriminatory slaughter by a government, deliberate neglect of populations, rape as a weapon of war, and so forth. Don’t our blind spots matter? Are they really just spots? Where is the accountability (the protection) from the predictably unforeseen consequences?  What power dynamics lay beneath the ethics of, say, a foreign organization publishing a report in the absence of a multi-layered, structured inquiry into the local system of social and political relationships?  
  • Does denunciatory advocacy and finger-pointing produce division and divisiveness? Can it reinforce hatred between groups (as the noted human rights lawyer Philippe Sands has concluded)?  Does this form of protection work – so lucrative to the INGO in terms of its public image — essentially constitute an act of Othering, a heightening of group identity that collides with community peace efforts (‘peace’ with a small P) attempting to bring sides together?
  • How does our reductionist, oversimplified and yet dominant narrative transform complex contexts into stereotypes of poverty and endless conflict that therein call for protection work and international humanitarian intervention? Who is it that protects people in crisis from the humanitarian narrative that trumpets the people’s and government’s incompetence, corruption, primitivism and helplessness?

Finally, if Nexus-thinking from a development perspective spotlights and challenges the inequitable distribution of power underlying so much of humanitarian action, it will necessarily confront the disempowering tactics and processes of humanitarian protection. Nexus-thinking should push the sector towards a protection analysis of what it means to claim the narrative of others, and then to propagate this narrative through the power of well-resourced communications departments and well-placed networks of influence.  What does it mean to sit at the table on behalf of others – what a big fat humanitarian anachronism! – when surely today all peoples can and already do organize to tell their own stories and lobby for their own justice, yet often remain functionally invisible because of the space taken and defended by the major Western agencies? 

Nexus-thinking should bring these and many other conversation-starters to the sector’s table. D and P therefore hold the capacity to end much confusion about humanitarian protection and, at the very least, promise to shake the power of H action and its exercise of H protection.

[Edited 30 November 2020 to correct some unclear phrasing]


[1] I note that PHAP is hosting an interesting humanitarian protection debate on Monday, 30 November: The State of Protection in the COVID-19 Era

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