Resources

Resource records (archive)

Six records filed under the resource template of an earlier version of this site. Each keeps its original identifier. Where the subject is now covered by an entry in the library, the record links to it.

d=1601 · Staying alive

Safety and security guidelines written for humanitarian volunteers working in conflict areas. The guide was aimed at people with no security background and no organisational security function behind them, and it set out the baseline that such a person needed to have settled before accepting a placement: what the organisation would and would not provide, who to contact in an emergency, what to do at a checkpoint, and how to judge whether a situation had become unsafe enough to stop working. Much of what it set out has since been absorbed into the general expectations placed on any organisation deploying staff.

d=1661 · Afghanistan: opiates, security and the limits of interdiction

A report on Afghanistan's opiate economy and on the security consequences of attempts to suppress it. Its relevance to aid agencies lay in two findings: that interdiction shifted production and processing rather than removing them, and that the control of the trade was bound up with local power in ways that shaped who could travel where. Agencies working in the affected provinces used it to understand why a route that was open in one season was closed in the next.

d=4319 · Negotiating humanitarian access in southern Afghanistan

An account of how access was actually obtained in southern Afghanistan: who held the decision, what an agreement consisted of, how it was recorded, and what made one hold. Its practical value was in its treatment of the local level. Agreements that had been reached with a leadership far from the district frequently did not bind the people who controlled the road, and the agencies that managed access well were the ones that negotiated where the decision was taken.

d=6236 · Saving Lives Together

The framework for cooperation between the United Nations and international NGOs on the safety and security of staff. It covers the areas where cooperation is possible without compromising the independence of either party: shared security information, common security phase systems, mutual access to relocation and evacuation arrangements, and joint training. Its practical importance is that it gives an NGO a defined basis on which to ask a UN mission for support, and a defined limit to what that support can require in return.

d=7917 · New actors in the humanitarian space

An examination of who had arrived in the humanitarian space and what they wanted. The actors it covered included private companies delivering services under contract, faith-based organisations with their own constituencies, diaspora groups operating outside the coordination structures, and states running assistance programmes directly. For established agencies the consequences were practical: competition for funding and for staff, coordination forums that no longer represented the sector, and a set of new interlocutors whose presence changed how the organisation itself was perceived.

d=8047 · Security risk management and religion

How religious identity, practice and affiliation shape the risk carried by staff, programmes and partners. The record covers the effect on acceptance in communities where religious authority is also political authority, the way the religious profile of individual staff changes how they are read, the practical questions raised by faith-based organisations working in areas where they are identified with a denomination, and the specific difficulties faced by staff whose beliefs require visible practice in an environment where that practice carries a risk.