Issue 46

Humanitarian protection

March 25, 2010
Humanitarian Practice Network
A boy stands near a line of internally displaced people in Pakistan
176 min read

The special feature of this issue of Humanitarian Exchange focuses on humanitarian protection. After little more than a decade, ‘protection’ has grown from a collection of activities executed by a handful of specialised agencies to being a key component of humanitarian action. Yet protection issues are still not systematically identified and addressed in humanitarian response and advocacy. In his thought provoking lead article, Marc Dubois argues that humanitarian actors must develop a more critical perspective on humanitarian protection, including an honest acknowledgement of their limitations. Related issues are examined in articles focused on the civilian protection mandates of peacekeeping missions and the challenges the protection cluster in Timor-Leste faced during the transition from emergency to development programming.

We also examine World Vision’s work to develop and test minimum standards in protection, a new field manual from ActionAid Australia and efforts to develop more community-based approaches to protection in Afghanistan, Burma, Kenya and Pakistan.

The policy and practice section containsa wide range of articles, including the application of health sector lessons from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to the recent earthquake disaster in Haiti; humanitarian financing in the Pakistan earthquake response; a defence of the UN’s policy on integration; capacitybuilding in Northern Uganda; lessons learned from GTZ’s Cash-for-Work programme in northern Afghanistan; and a Red Cross/Red Crescent field training model for preparing humanitarian workers for disaster response.

Issue 46 articles