Definitions in Grey: Conflict vs Post Conflict

This week, am asking people I respect a tremendous amount to weigh in on some of the more contentious humanitarian issues, everything from the costs and benefits of advocacy to the question of neutrality and legitimacy.

The piece below was written by Jocelyn Kelly, the Research Coordinator at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.  She has previously written for Humanitarian Relief on rape as a weapon of war.

Jocelyn's post below criticizes the assumption - often made by donors - that there's an easy dividing line between disaster and post-disaster, or conflict and post-conflict phases.

For musings from this week's other contributors, see here.

Definitions in grey: conflict vs. post-conflict phases

Last month, a study reported some pretty shocking results about how disaster and displacement influence rates of violence. Looking at people living in protracted displacement after Hurricane Katrina, Anastario et al found that rates of sexual violence were more than three times higher post-Katrina vs. pre-Katrina in 2006.

But the really surprising finding was that the rates of sexual violence didn’t decrease much in the year after the crisis was over –sexual violence rates in 2007 were still more than two times higher than the pre-hurricane rate.

This blog isn’t about sexual violence or Katrina, but it is about how we make the choice to say a disaster is “over”. I think we would all like to imagine disasters looking like an acute spike interrupting baseline – going from “normal” to “crisis” and back to “normal” in a symmetrical way.

During a research internship in Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2006, I watched the managers of my field office stay up until four in the morning preparing an unexpected presentation: it was to convince a very large government donor to continue giving them “disaster phase” funding as opposed to the “post-disaster” funding being pushed on them.

In the “disaster phase” interventions like water sanitation and supplemental feeding could be funded. In the “post disaster” phase, development, education and income-generating projects could be funded.

The presentation my colleagues prepared gave statistics on children starving in remote districts, supplementary feeding centers being overrun, and field hospitals treating fresh war wounds. This war, they argued, was not over. The presentation worked and the rattled funding representative agreed to continue funding “disaster” phase programs.

But here’s the catch: women at the time were also actively calling for income-generating training and better education for themselves and their children. Why did it have to be an either/or decision?

Katrina was a relatively “definable” disaster – there were specific emergencies occurring in a country with a comparatively high logistical and response capacity. Now consider all of the increasingly complex asymmetrical wars, insurgencies, and incidents where natural and man-made disasters complicate each other.

The phrase “complex humanitarian disaster” was coined for a reason. All of the issues being brought up in this week’s blogs are part of the increasingly intricate humanitarian terrain: how to balance advocacy and programming; how to stay safe despite increasing disregard of international humanitarian law; how to define neutrality and impartiality.

The more complicated emergencies become, the longer they will take to recover from. All of this defies an easy delineation between “disaster” and “post-disaster”. The Anastario study begins to measure effects we only suspected before – and to prove it takes much longer to recover from emergencies than we might want to acknowledge. We have to remember that violence and malnutrition can still happen “post” disaster while education and livelihood programs are needed during a protracted crisis.

The human mind is a dichotomy machine. We naturally operate using distinctions like “us” and “them”, “familiar” and “strange”, “normal” and “abnormal”. To keep from being paralyzed by the enormous complexity in our world, we have to place things neatly into conceptual bins. I don’t think we should get gridlocked figuring out how to label things.

But when labels carry enormous funding and programmatic implications, we do have to think about them. Hurricanes can lead to both flooding and sexual violence. Wars can cause malnutrition and greater needs for women’s education. As our crises become more complex, our solutions should as well.

[Photo of eastern Congo from ABC News / AFP]