Humanitarian Principles: A Bridge and a Compass for Civil-Military Coordination

Abstract

Military involvement in relief operations is by no means novel. Depending on the context, coordination between the military and humanitarian actors has ranged from sheer co-existence¹ to cooperation and coordinated access negotiations. Due to military organisations’ expanding interest in the provision of humanitarian assistance, the use of military assets in humanitarian operations has been steadily increasing. The growing prominence of a comprehensive approach—increasingly called upon when conducting stability operations or bolstering state resilience to hybrid threats—has included the conduct of military operations, diplomacy, humanitarian aid, political processes, economic development and technology into the range of instruments adopted by this approach. This leads to military and humanitarian actors sharing the same operational space not only in traditional conflicts and disasters, but also in emerging complex situations, such as post-conflict and stabilisation contexts or large-scale migration crises.

The views and opinions expressed in this chapter are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the British Red Cross or the wider Red Cross Red Crescent Movement.

Civil-Military Coordination, CIMIC, CMCoord and Civil-Military relations are often used interchangeably. In this chapter, we use the term widely adopted in the humanitarian sector “civil military coordination” as defined by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA): the essential dialogue and interaction between civilian and military actors in humanitarian emergencies that are necessary to protect and promote Humanitarian Principles, avoid competition, minimise inconsistency, and, when appropriate, pursue common goals (http://www.unocha.org/what-we-do/coordination-tools/UN-CMCoord/overview).