Organisational behaviour of humanitarian agencies in their interaction with armed rebel groups

Humanitarian organisations have developed manifold strategies to deal with armed rebel groups in their everyday operations. While some humanitarian agencies directly engage with armed non-state actors in order to get humanitarian access or to secure aid workers' protection, others opt for avoidance strategies. Although it is often reasoned that the humanitarian engagement of rebels would be mainly driven by the humanitarian organisations' mandates, the dissertation argues that a range of other organisational factors on the side of the humanitarian agencies equally influence interaction processes with insurgent forces. Amongst these are the operational goals, available resources and structures of humanitarian organisations, the humanitarian personnel delivering aid, as well as the perception the humanitarian organisation has of the respective insurgent group it is dealing with. In order to test the theoretical assumptions that are drawn up, a case study was conducted on humanitarian interactions with the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). The research results confirm that the mentioned organisational aspects - to varying degrees - impact on the ways humanitarian actors engage insurgent forces.