Browse by Theme: Conflict & Fragility

This paper lays out the case for a renewed focus on conflict sensitivity by donor agencies. It presents recommendations for how donors can integrate conflict sensitivity into their own systems and processes, as well as how they can promote conflict sensitivity in their implementing partners. The paper is intended to inform and influence policy makers and practitioners across a range of donor agencies. The recommendations have relevance across humanitarian, development and peacebuilding activities. It has been developed by the DFID-funded Conflict Sensitivity Consortium, and draws upon experience and lessons learned during implementation of the consortium project.

A report from the Danish Institute for International Studies with input from CARE Denmark, focuses on the links between climate change and conflict, the types of conflict and approaches to conflict prevention. CARE Niger’s Wells for Peace project is featured as a case study, with its main innovation ‘a thoroughly participatory approach in which social agreement amongst key stakeholders and users is reached before the infrastructure – in this case a well – is established.’ The approach is credited with preventing local conflicts that normally result from water initiatives. With conflicts turning violent in the intervention region falling from 56% at baseline to 24% to 0% after 5 years.

Pastoral areas in the Horn of Africa are frequently seen as a region of poverty and constant crisis, where repeated rain failures leave millions of people dependent on food aid. The long-term erosion of pastoralists’ resilience is ascribed to various causes: a degraded range, the loss of key grazing lands, increasing population pressure and conflict. But pastoralism is also a modern industry, bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars each year from a thriving international trade, creating an increasingly commercialised livestock-owning class coexist-ing with an ever poorer majority.

This presents a dual challenge. How can this vital economic sector be supported, at the same time as sup-porting the majority of pastoralists to remain independent, with resilient livelihoods?

The Conflict Sensitivity Consortium, including CARE International, has placed a heavy emphasis on testing practical approaches to effective conflict sensitivity, learning from experience and carefully documenting identified best practices. This approach has culminated in the production of this How to Guide to Conflict Sensitivity. This Guide draws upon Consortium experience to illustrate real examples of applying conflict sensitivity. It aims to provide practical advice suitable for anyone aiming to improve conflict sensitivity, whether in the field of development, humanitarian aid or peacebuilding work. It aims to provide user-friendly information for people who are focusing at project or at organisation-wide level, whether aiming for best practice or just starting out on the journey towards conflict sensitivity.

"Focusing on theories of change can improve the effectiveness of peacebuilding interventions.

A review of 19 peacebuilding projects in three conflict-affected countries found that the process of articulating and reviewing theories of change adds rigour and transparency, clarifies project logic, highlights assumptions that need to be tested, and helps identify appropriate participants and partners.

However, the approach has limitations, including the difficulty of gathering theory validating evidence."

Since the introduction of the Do No Harm framework more than ten years ago, the humanitarian sector has invested in a range of initiatives to address programme quality and accountability. Although aid agencies often seek to be neutral or nonpartisan toward the winners and losers of a war, the impact of their aid is not neutral regarding whether conflict worsens or abates’. This paper identifies conflict flashpoints common to the activities of first-phase emergency responses; identifies how programme and surge capacity staff currently apply conflict sensitivity in the context of rapid-onset emergencies, maps key conflict-sensitivity challenges faced by aid agencies; and draws out conclusions and practical recommendations to strengthen the use of conflict-sensitive approaches in future humanitarian emergencies.

Every day, the lives of women and girls are being destroyed by sexual violence. Used as a tactic of war to terrorise communities, with devastating effect, rape is the hidden reality of conflict.

The UN Security Council has committed to tackle this violence before, during and after conflict, and to help the women and girls left to deal with the consequences. We challenge them to make this commitment a reality.

Throughout history, violence against women and girls has been an integral part of armed conflict.

They are killed, injured, widowed and orphaned. Rape has been used by fighting forces as a tactic of war to humiliate, intimidate and traumatise communities, and as a method of ethnic cleansing.

Women and girls are abducted into sexual slavery or forced to exchange sex or marriage for survival.

The statistics are stark. Up to 50,000 women were raped in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and up to 500,000 during the Rwandan genocide.

Horrifyingly, still, 40 women are brutally raped each day in just one province of the Democratic Republic of Congo.