Red Lines - Exploring the Ethics of Humanitarian Negotiation

There is a clear need for better understandings of the ethical dimension of humanitarian negotiation. This includes theory and methods for empirical research on the subject (descriptive ethics) as well as philosophical analysis for the evaluation of ethical problems (applied ethics). Such understandings of a neglected aspect of world politics are important in themselves, but they would also inform general scholarship and practice on humanitarian action and the ethics of international engagement across cultural and political contexts. Both the efficiency and legitimacy of humanitarian action are hampered by the lack of attention to the ethics of humanitarian negotiation. This societal challenge is reinforced by the continued global growth of the humanitarian sector, recurrent political pressures on the humanitarian principles, and a demise of political alternativesto humanitarian law and relief when the UN Security Council is blocked (OCHA, 2020). In addition to the effects of climate change, pressure on the humanitarian sector has grown as a result of the current coronavirus pandemic. In the contexts of war, public health challenges, environmental disaster and repressive regimes, humanitarian actors will continue to face difficult ethical dilemmas. This project aims at developing a theoretically adequate and practically relevant analytical framework. It will be achieved by starting from the ethical dilemmas experienced by negotiators and treating these as ethical problems to be further examined. This is enabled by close cooperation with CCHN, which shares the objective of introducing ethics to theory and practice of humanitarian negotiations. Represented by its Director in the project, the CCHN is committed to integrate findings from the project in their training material and activities beyond the project period.