Identifying Contemporary Civil Wars' Effects on Humanitarian Needs, Responses & Outcomes

Abstract Contemporary civil wars are highly complex processes involving a myriad of nonstate, state, civilian, and external actors. These actors develop systems of relationships that evolve during conflict and affect humanitarian needs, responses, and outcomes. This is because humanitarian actors are not isolated from but are part of these social systems. Their activities are constituted by and are constitutive of the interactions between the internal and external actors engaged in civil wars. This essay advances an analytical framework for mapping systems of relationships between the actors at the center of contemporary civil wars to understand how the relationships established by humanitarians transform for reasons outside of their control. This framework highlights the contingency inherent in wartime humanitarian activities in general, and health care provision in particular, and the need for locally informed, adaptive humanitarian practices in changing conflict environments.