This Preliminary Report and the research on which it is based are organized around four key issues that will continue to challenge the humanitarian enterprise during the next ten years. These are the avowed universality of humanitarianism, the implications of terrorism and counter-terrorism for humanitarian action, the search for coherence between humanitarian and political agendas, and the security of humanitarian personnel and the beneficiaries of humanitarian action. These four topics are approached as individual “petals” which, taken together, constitute a single “flower”. The research has been structured so as to examine each of the issues in detail and to explore their relationship to each other.

These four topics were identified in a broad sense at a workshop convened by the Feinstein International Center in Boston in October 2003 against the backdrop of the US-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and of widespread concern among humanitarian organizations and donor governments about the implications of these crises for the humanitarian enterprise more broadly. More recently, the complexities of humanitarian action in post-invasion Iraq have reinforced questions about whether these two mega-crises are changing global perceptions of humanitarian action and undercutting the neutrality and independence of assistance and protection work. Views vary on the extent to which lines have been blurred and the humanitarian enterprise compromised by association in these crises. While there may well be disagreement on the nature of the bruises suffered by humanitarianism, there is no denying that the context in which humanitarian action takes place is evolving rapidly. In the wake of muscular approaches to “world ordering,” the very essence of humanitarianism may well be at stake ...

 

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