Humanitarian negotiation:challenges and compromise in hard-to-reach areas

Recent decades have seen increasing recognition of humanitarian negotiation as a field of both theoretical inquiry and operational practice to better comprehend how humanitarians negotiate—a dimension of humanitarian work that has been largely seen as instinctual or intuitive or otherwise dismissed as ‘part of the job’ in running humanitarian programmes. During negotiations in authoritarian contexts, humanitarians may struggle with inherent tensions of upholding humanitarian principles in the face of political interests, the competing needs for confidentiality and coordination between different organisations, and the challenges of adequately assessing interlocutors in a fluid environment where control of territory frequently shifts. Against this backdrop, this chapter discusses the working definition of humanitarian negotiation, the broader political context of humanitarian negotiations, and aims to offer the reader reflections on engaging with authoritarian regimes from research and practice.