Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
Well you've struck on the issue, that 99% of the Conflict Industry wants to ignore.
I don't doubt that it sometimes gets ignored in practice, sometimes out of ignorance or willful neglect. More often, humanitarian organizations face damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't choices about whether to help civilians (and influence the conflict), or not do so (and let innocents die).

That being said, I don't think you can say that "99% of the Conflict Industry wants to ignore" it. On the contrary, ever since Mary B Anderson wrote Do No Harm, hardly a week goes by without a conference on the moral dilemmas and operational imperatives of this issue. Indeed, much of the work on "peace and conflict impact assessment" or "conflict sensitive development," the "ethics of peacebuilding,"(etc, etc) is motivated by precisely this concern, namely that humanitarian and development assistance can serve to exacerbate, rather than mitigate, armed conflict, or otherwise have perverse social and political effects. OECD aid agencies have been meeting on these issues for years (up to and including the ministerial level), almost all of them now have some form of internal assessment or screening process for these sorts of issues (of varying degrees of effectiveness), and while the identification of "best practices" and Principles for Good International Engagement doesn't mean that follow-up is perfect, the aid community can hardly be accused of avoiding the problem.

This shouldn't be seen as a blanket defence of the aid industry, but I do think its important not to leave the impression that aid folks are unaware. Moreover, its not as if they face easy choices in highly politicized environments: when UNRWA complained about IDF hits on its facilities in Gaza, it was accused of a pro-Hamas bias; when it teaches about the Holocaust in its schools or promotes tolerance at its summer camps it is accused by Hamas of serving a Zionist agenda.

The real question, IMHO, is why having recognized the nature of the dilemma, do mistakes get repeated. Here the answer lies in a combination of training, bureaucratic, operational, and political factors, rather akin to how countries can "get" COIN at an intellectual level, yet see much less-than-perfect implementation.