Equitable access to safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines will be the defining global issue of 2021. Working to ensure that people in areas affected by armed conflict and violence are part of equitable access not only makes moral, epidemiological and economic sense; the unprecedented momentum surrounding COVID-19 also represents an opportunity to eliminate other preventable diseases and strengthen our collective readiness for future pandemics.

Most debate has understandably focused on vaccine distribution between countries. In this post, ICRC Policy Adviser Charles Deutscher offers three considerations for equitable access within countries affected by armed conflict and violence.

As humanitarian organizations become more active in and reliant upon new technologies and the digital domain, they evolve from simple bystanders to full-fledged stakeholders in cyberspace – able to build on the advantages of new technologies but also vulnerable to adverse cyber operations that can impact their capacity to protect and assist people affected by violence or armed conflict.

The 2020 cyberattack on SolarWinds, a major US information technology company, demonstrated the chaos a hack can cause by targeting digital supply chain components. What does the hack mean for the humanitarian cyberspace, and what can we learn from it? Massimo Marelli, ICRC’s Head of Data Protection Office, draws out some possible lessons and the way forward by exploring the notion of ‘digital sovereignty’.

Cyber operations have become a reality of today’s armed conflicts, and their use is likely to continue to increase in the future. In response to this trend, the ICRC has long maintained that international humanitarian law (IHL) governs – and limits – any use of cyber operations during armed conflicts. But what is really at stake?

In this post, ICRC legal advisers Tilman Rodenhäuser and Kubo Mačák explain that the risk of harm to humans is significant, and that the seemingly technical issue of IHL applicability in cyberspace makes a difference in the real world.

In 2020, the ICRC counted 614 armed groups of concern to the organization’s humanitarian operations around the world. As part of its impartial humanitarian work, the ICRC had contact with roughly three quarters of these groups – irrespective of the countries in which they operate, their ideology, religion, motivation or any other characteristic.

The ICRC recently published a position paper elaborating the main reasons for the organization’s engagement with armed groups, with a focus on non-State armed groups (NSAGs) that are parties to armed conflicts, and some of the challenges of such engagement. In this post, Jelena Pejic, ICRC senior legal adviser, Irénée Herbet, Head of Global Affairs & Non-State Armed Groups, and Tilman Rodenhäuser, ICRC legal adviser, highlight some of the paper’s findings.

Cash has been an exceptional vector of progress in humanitarian action, empowering people, protecting dignity, mitigating the negative secondary effects of in-kind assistance, improving accountability to affected populations, increasing participation in humanitarian and development responses, supporting local economies and, last but not least, boosting operational efficiency, which in turn saves some humanitarian cash.

But what happens when cash goes digital, bringing with it the risks of exclusion, discrimination, or surveillance? In this post, ICRC Policy Advisor Pierrick Devidal opens an honest conversation as to whether and how humanitarians should continue using digital cash.

Even in the midst of a pandemic, during a seemingly endless cascade of events, climate change remains a defining issue. Its effects are even more severe for people affected by conflict and violence, who find themselves navigating the collision of war and environmental crises. How can the humanitarian community work with affected people to design policies and practices that have an impact?

In this post, Malvika Verma, a project development officer for ACTED Sri Lanka and India, argues that to strengthen climate action in conflict settings, a solid understanding of people’s vulnerabilities and adaptive capacities must be informed by the bigger picture – an analysis of pre-existing circuits of power and political relationships.

The destruction of cultural heritage in recent years has been the most significant since the Second World War, affecting movable and immovable property as well as intangible cultural heritage, archives, and documentary heritage. In many armed conflicts, the damage is no longer just collateral; cultural property is also deliberately targeted.

Nearly two years on since the milestone International Conference on the 20th anniversary of the 1999 Second Protocol of the 1954 Hague Convention, Jonathan Cuénoud, Legal Advisor for the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, and Benjamin Charlier, Legal Advisor for the ICRC, revisit the achievements and challenges facing the implementation of the Second Protocol and encourage UNESCO Member States to become party to the 1999 Second Protocol if they have not already done so.

Protracted conflict and unprecedented levels of displacement have broken down the barriers between development and humanitarian work, prompting humanitarian organizations to engage more with social protection systems. While this presents another entry point to support affected populations in the medium- and long-term, it also stresses the importance of the principles of neutrality, impartiality, independence, and humanity in humanitarian action (NIIHA) which, if compromised, could impact the trust of parties to a conflict or affected populations, as well as access to the latter.

In this post, ahead of the ICRC Digitharium’s ‘Digital Dilemmas’ virtual debate on social protection systems, Cristina Quijano Carrasco from the Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs explains why it is essential – particularly in this digital age of interoperable systems – that humanitarian organizations consider these challenges in assessing their engagement in social protection programs.

As the world faces more frequent and intense crises—driven in part by climate change, political and social conflict, cyber attacks, and disease outbreak—humanitarians are working to protect vulnerable people beyond the initial shock of each new emergency. While coordinating efforts between humanitarian programmes and social protection systems may help support individual and community resilience, it also creates the risk of new threats to data protection.

In this post, ahead of the ICRC Digitharium’s ‘Digital Dilemmas’ virtual debate on social protection systems, Jill Capotosto from the Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs reviews one of the key data protection concerns of combining – or ‘mosaicking’ – humanitarian and social protection data systems: the risk of revealing new information, or ‘data revelation’. Particularly in fragile environments, the unintentional revelation of new information may expose both beneficiaries and humanitarian organizations to unanticipated harm.

In the humanitarian sector, bureaucracy has been faulted for everything from ageism and the suppression of talent to a bloated and inefficient response, as examined by Hugo Slim on this blog last year.

But when you examine three of the main issues currently plaguing the sector — sexual misconduct, corruption and fraud, and the politicization of resource allocation — the case for watering down humanitarian bureaucracy weakens, argue Dr. Aaron Clark-Ginsberg and Mary Kate Adgie, researchers at the nonprofit nonpartisan RAND Corporation. Instead, as they outline below, what might be needed is more bureaucracy, not less.