Protracted conflicts are a major source of human suffering and can cause long-term displacement and development reversals. Although protracted conflicts can take many forms, they are generally characterized by their longevity, intractability and mutability. Authorities involved in situations of protracted conflict face complex challenges, particularly when it comes to ensuring that international humanitarian law (IHL) is respected by their armed forces.

The government of the Philippines has been involved in multiple non-international armed conflicts against insurgent groups for more than fifty years. In this interview, Lieutenant-Colonel Joven Capitulo, who works to implement the policies, activities and programmes of the Philippine Department of National Defense and Philippine Department of Defense initiatives on national legislation pertaining to compliance with IHL, shares the perspective of a State dealing with several protracted situations of non-international armed conflict. He tells the Review about some of the IHL considerations involved when a military is engaged in counter-insurgency on its own territory over a period of decades.

Situations of protracted armed conflict, whether one armed conflict or a succession of several armed conflicts over a long period of time, subject the affected population to both short-term and long-term effects of warfare. Below are two timelines tracing the experiences of two women during situations of protracted conflict in two countries: Sheringul in Afghanistan, and Om Nawwar in Iraq. Their experiences show that life continues in such contexts, despite violence and instability.

For almost two decades now, Geneva Call has been engaged in developing humanitarian dialogue with some 150 armed non-State actors (ANSAs), with the aim of increasing their knowledge and respect of humanitarian norms. Developing a protection dialogue with ANSAs is not an easy task, and it becomes more complex when groups split, mutate or join larger movements. Humanitarian organizations need to adapt their analysis to a more frequent timescale, keeping in touch constantly with a wide range of key stakeholders in order not to lose track of the current groups’ status and structure. In this note, Geneva Call's Director of Operations discusses some of the organization's experiences and lessons learned.

The rehabilitation of essential services infrastructure following hostilities, whether during a conflict or post-conflict, is a complex undertaking. This is made more complicated in protracted conflicts due to the continuing cycle of damage and expedient repair amid changing demands. The rehabilitation paradigm that was developed for the successful post-World War II rehabilitation of Germany and Japan has been less successful since. There are a myriad of conflicting interests that impede its application, yet the issue consistently comes down to a lack of systems-level understanding of the current situation on the ground and a lack of alignment between what is delivered and the actual local need. This article proposes a novel conceptual framework to address this, affording a greater “system of systems” understanding of the local essential services and how they can be restored to reflect the changed needs of the local population that has itself been changed by the conflict. The recommendations draw on heuristic practice and commercially available tools to provide a practicable approach to restoring infrastructure function in order to enable essential services that are resilient to temporary returns to violence and support the overall rehabilitation of the affected community.

The displacement of civilians during a protracted war is a difficult issue that deserves our attention, and Iraq is unfortunately an emblematic example of this phenomenon. Based on the literature produced by humanitarian organizations and academia, this article aims at analyzing what triggers displacement in protracted conflict, highlighting the role of international humanitarian law (IHL) violations. It discusses how Iraq has been struggling with acts of violence, hostilities and IHL violations that have generated displacement and human suffering.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When large numbers of people die as a result of humanitarian emergencies, their bodies and remains are often managed with little consideration for their dignity. This may impact the capacity to identify the deceased and prevent them from becoming missing persons. Many of the existing guidelines for managing the dead in emergencies, including those published by the International Police Organization, the World Health Organization and the International Committee of the Red Cross, are accomplished from a technical point of view, but offer little or no specific guidance on guaranteeing respect for the deceased and their remains. In 2018, the Missing Persons Project of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Right to Truth, Truth(s) through Rights project of the University of Geneva convened a meeting of experts to discuss the need for developing guidance to guarantee the dignified treatment of the dead in humanitarian emergencies. Participants identified the need worldwide for a set of general principles to guide practitioners and decision-makers in their efforts to ensure respect for dead persons and human remains in humanitarian emergencies, and recommended their development.