Over the past five years, various developments in the international aid policy sphere have resurfaced a decades-old discussion about the link between humanitarian action, development and peace efforts – the so-called “triple nexus”. This discussion focuses on protracted conflicts and fragile settings, as these are environments where humanitarian funding and response are overstretched and where development and peace struggle to take hold.

Three important reference points in this policy environment are the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),1 the Agenda for Humanity2 and the twin United Nations (UN) resolutions on sustaining peace.3 These various commitments have been driving development actors to seek ways to engage earlier and remain present in conflict-affected areas.4 They have mobilized many donors and organizations around a vision in which humanitarian action works to reduce needs, risks and vulnerability, in addition to responding to needs,5 and they have spurred the UN system into organizational reforms to ensure a system-wide coherent effort towards the SDGs, including in places affected by conflict.6 They have also been accompanied by renewed calls for, and efforts towards, greater transparency, efficiency, accountability, collaboration and results across the international aid system.

Efforts to achieve the right synergy between humanitarian action, development and peace efforts have again regained momentum globally. But they have also raised concerns within the humanitarian community about a shrinking space for neutral, impartial and independent humanitarian action during armed conflict.

In this Q&A, Policy Adviser Filipa Schmitz Guinote discusses the International Committee of the Red Cross's (ICRC) policy reflections on the interface between humanitarian action, development and peace, and the so-called “triple nexus” discussion. She unpacks some of the conceptual and practical tensions around humanitarian principles and humanitarian identity in the interaction between humanitarian, development and peace actors. She also outlines the rationale behind the ICRC's work with affected people in protracted conflicts, against the backdrop of an ICRC Institutional Strategy which commits the organization to building sustainable humanitarian impact with affected people and working with others.

This note discusses the challenges of water service delivery before, during and after protracted armed conflict, focusing on barriers that may impede successful transition from emergency to development interventions. The barriers are grouped according to three major contributing factors (three “C”s): culture (organizational goals and procedures), cash (financing practices) and capacity (know-how). By way of examples, the note explores ways in which development agencies can overcome these barriers during the three phases of a protracted armed conflict, using examples of World Bank projects and experiences in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa. Before the crisis, development agencies need to work to prevent armed conflict. In a situation of active armed conflict or when conflict escalates, development agencies need to remain engaged as much as possible, as this will speed up post-conflict recovery. When conflict subsides, development agencies need to balance the relative effort placed on providing urgently needed emergency relief and water supply and sanitation services with the effort placed on re-establishing sector oversight roles and capacity of local institutions to oversee and manage service delivery in the long term.

More than ten years after the Liberia Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) released its Final Report, there has been no implementation of the recommendations proffered. This article focuses on post-conflict memorialization, the TRC's strategy to engender collective remembering, and a set of State-led actions designed to teach future generations about the past violence with a view to preventing relapse into violent conflict. Both the constructive and destructive patterns of remembering that have evolved in the wake of the government's silence since the release of the recommendations will be analyzed.

This paper compares how rules of international humanitarian law and rules of Islamic law protect children in armed conflict. It examines areas of convergence and divergence, and areas where there is room for clarification between these two legal systems. This comparative exercise spotlights four key topics marking the wartime experience of children: the unlawful recruitment and use of children by armed forces and armed groups, the detention of children, their access to education, and the situation of children separated from their families.

The construction of historical memory is closely linked to the guarantees provided by the right to freedom of expression. This right ensures that victims and society in general are able to speak about the past, narrate their own stories, and call for and influence social discussion and institutional reform. Mechanisms such as access to State archives, participation in the media, journalistic coverage of armed conflicts and the free flow of stories, artistic endeavours, criticisms and condemnations empower victims and the rest of society in the construction of alternative narratives and independent memories. This article examines case law of the Inter-American System of Human Rights that elaborates on freedom of expression, and considers its importance for the construction of historical memory. It also touches upon some decisions taken by the Colombian high courts, relevant to a context in which mechanisms of transitional justice have recently been implemented.

Legal controversies and disagreements have arisen about the timing and duration of numerous contemporary armed conflicts, not least regarding how to discern precisely when those conflicts began and when they ended (if indeed they have ended). The existence of several long-running conflicts – some stretching across decades – and the corresponding suffering that they entail accentuate the stakes of these debates. To help shed light on some select aspects of the duration of contemporary wars, this article analyzes two sets of legal issues: first, the notion of “protracted armed conflict” as formulated in a war-crimes-related provision of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and second, the rules, principles and standards laid down in international humanitarian law and international criminal law pertaining to when armed conflicts have come to an end. The upshot of the analysis is that under existing international law, there is no general category of “protracted armed conflict”; that the question of whether to pursue such a category raises numerous challenges; and that several dimensions of the law concerning the end of armed conflict are unsettled.

Eradicating and addressing child marriage in situations of armed conflict requires that stakeholders increase their attention, knowledge, evidence-based protection measures, and resources in a coordinated fashion. To this end, this article examines what constitutes child marriage within the international legal framework. It then presents a concise analysis of what is known about child marriage in development contexts, before moving on to discuss the (limited) state of knowledge on child marriage in humanitarian settings, and the global response. It presents information on different married child populations, including child brides and grooms, girls forcibly married to armed actors, child widows, and child marriage within natural disasters. It concludes with ideas on the information and knowledge that is still needed to inform effective response.

Despite the existence of a comprehensive international legal framework protecting children in armed conflict, ensuring its respect by armed non-State actors (ANSAs) still remains an important challenge. This can be linked to several circumstances, such as their lack of knowledge of the law, the absence of an incentive to abide by the applicable rules, their fragmented structure and their lack of capacity to implement the applicable framework. Certain practical cases, however, show that ANSAs’ behaviours may vary throughout armed conflicts. While certain groups have, at a given moment, breached some of their international obligations, others have shown some degree of commitment to respecting children's safeguards. When addressing the prohibition of recruiting and using children in hostilities, the reasons behind these variations have remained insufficiently explored. This article reviews some of the lessons learned from Geneva Call's experience when engaging ANSAs towards their compliance with child protection norms.

Presidents of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) occupy a special position: they are not only direct witnesses to the march of history, but they also participate in it given their prominent role in the humanitarian sphere. This dual status becomes particularly salient when they write about the organization they run. By reviewing the published writings of ICRC presidents, this article analyzes how these individuals combine their personal experience with the organization's history, and the role this history plays in their writing.

Ever since the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Colombia has shifted from one war to the next, be it the War of Independence, the fierce confrontations between liberal and conservative parties or the countless conflicts among guerrillas, paramilitary groups and the State. These wars have brought along a unique contribution to the development of international humanitarian law (IHL). The purpose of this article is to explore the myriad of ways in which Colombia has implemented (and at times made progress on) IHL rules, and to analyze how different conflicts have led the country to explore issues such as the protection of minors, the meaning of the principle of precaution, the compensation of armed conflict victims and the creation of some rather sophisticated transitional justice mechanisms.

The efforts to create a world fit for children, including for those affected by armed conflict, remain a work in progress. Increasingly, regional organizations, prime among them the African Union and its organs, are being asked to play a more meaningful role in pushing for the realization of the rights and protections of children in armed conflict. This piece explores trends and developments in respect of children and armed conflict in Africa, and offers few ideas on how the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, which holds significant promise, can continue to rise to this challenge.

This Opinion Note is a reflection on the challenges faced by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in emerging countries that want to be heard in the humanitarian world without being major donors. The author underlines the importance of the feeling of humiliation that can be seen in the narratives of these countries. After listing some of the specific activities that can be developed in such contexts, he refers to the concept of strategic anchoring developed by the ICRC in order to work more effectively in a world that is becoming increasingly multipolar.

With a focus on situations of protracted conflict, this article explores the new horizons offered by the recent explanation by the United Nations Human Rights Committee on the right to life in its General Comment 36. The freshly formulated contours of this right not only present normative clarity but are also valuable for conflict management and resolution. Considering the articulation by the Human Rights Committee, we can now see two dimensions of this right: existence and dignity. Although the existence dimension is not new, one now finds additional insights concerning the legality, transparency and accountability of the use of lethal force that have particular relevance to armed conflict. The new dignity dimension has practical implications for the conditions of life in protracted conflicts, taking us beyond norms to the policy spheres of humanitarian action and development. Tracing the origins of the term “protracted conflict” to the late Lebanese scholar Edward Azar, the article also introduces the reader to some of his work and thinking.

Inter-State wars seem to have come to an end in the late 1990s; ever since, the global reality of collective violence has come down to the chaos of contemporary civil wars and terrorist attacks. In this article, it will be argued that in today's civil wars, as well as in terrorist violence, the traditional warrior ethos is fading, giving way to types of violence governed by a new psychological and social paradigm. In other words, it is assumed that the very set of values that has universally determined the male gender role and the frame of hegemonic masculinity since time immemorial has also informed the waging of war according to a “heroic regime of violence”, and this phenomenon has made war a desirable option for countless generations of young men. On the other hand, the global changes entailed by modernity seem to have undermined this warrior ethos, giving way to a “post-heroic regime” in which extermination-oriented violence, rather than combat-oriented violence, is fostered. In this article, the author will scrutinize the founding psychological and social determinants that have so far upheld the cultural construct of the heroic model, in order to illuminate the ominous consequences of the deculturation of war in today's chaotic conflicts. In such contexts, the men who are fighting1 suffer from a loss of meaning and the impossibility of gaining dignity and social recognition in an ecosystem of humiliation and ubiquitous violence that has little to do with the expectations of pride and dignity conveyed by the past ideals of heroism associated with a certain vision of masculinity. The article will also discuss ways and means of getting the message of international humanitarian law through to men on the front lines caught up in such circumstances.

The protection of children in war and other situations of violence is enshrined in various bodies of law, and these provide a framework for several International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) activities benefiting children, in particular in areas where the institution has a clear mandate and where vulnerabilities are exacerbated by international humanitarian law (IHL) violations. The activities of the ICRC benefiting children stem from its mandate provided by the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the 1977 Additional Protocols, the Statutes of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, and the resolutions of the International Conferences of the Red Cross and Red Crescent. Although the ICRC is not a child protection agency per se and child protection is not a standalone activity for the organization, it makes up a significant part of ICRC's operations, in particular where children's vulnerabilities are exacerbated by the realities of armed conflict. In this conversation with the Review, Monique Nanchen, the ICRC's Global Adviser on Children, explores the multiple efforts being put in place to mainstream child protection into the ICRC's work, and reveals some of the various challenges that come with protection and assistance activities benefiting children affected by conflict and other situations of violence.

This article provides a legal analysis of the largely uncharted notion of “acts harmful to the enemy” under international humanitarian law, which reconciles the humanitarian need to grant special protection to medical services (medical personnel, units and transports) in the interests of the wounded and sick with the military necessity to remove it when acts are committed contrary to good faith and for hostile purposes or with effects which harm the adverse party. The meaning of the notion is clarified by primarily looking into the legality of an attack against land-based medical services by the aggrieved party to the conflict as a consequence of harmful acts. It concludes with specific recommendations on how to interpret the law governing such an attack, considered prima facie lawful, on a hospital.

This article describes how schools are used for military purposes in today's conflicts. It summarizes the latest data on the practice, before explaining how the military use of schools harms students’ and teachers’ safety and impedes students’ right to education. The article concludes by examining the diverse legal and military responses to this practice, and the foundation they lay for the 2015 Safe Schools Declaration and for further action.

Remembrance of war and conflict exposes the intricate interweaving of cultural memory and identity. Nations commemorate war to link narratives of the past with the present. This linking creates shared national narratives that temporally reinforce identities across the geography of the nation and among diverse citizenry. In this paper, the authors turn their attention towards the experiential and place-based concerns of the politics of memory within the context of war. It is argued that through attentiveness to individual experience we can better understand how cultural memory is enveloped into constructions of identity and critique such constructions alongside official narratives.

As cash increasingly becomes an essential part of humanitarian assistance, it is critical that practitioners are aware of, and work to mitigate, exposure to protection risks among the most vulnerable recipients. This article presents findings from qualitative research exploring protection risks and barriers that arise in cash programming for internally displaced persons at high risk of violence and exploitation in Cameroon and Afghanistan. The authors conclude with recommendations for mainstreaming global protection principles into cash programmes, as well as key considerations for designing and implementing cash programmes in ways that minimize existing risks of harm and avoid creating new ones.