Description
Host-state responses to international humanitarian assistance in civil wars are diverse, adaptive, and strategically constructed. This study analyses twenty conflict-affected countries to explain the ways governments engage with, regulate, or instrumentalise international humanitarian action. Drawing on content analysis of published documents from United Nations agencies, and international non-governmental organisations, it develops a typology of host-state responses that captures the varied logics of humanitarian governance under conditions of conflict.
Six recurrent modes of engagement emerge: administrative gatekeeping through permits and access control; coercive and exclusionary control through violence; performative sovereignty through symbolic cooperation for legitimacy; conditional partnership through managerial co-ownership with international actors; normative regulation through moral or ideological governance of aid; and developmental appropriation through the integration of humanitarian action into national planning and international frameworks.
These forms are often hybrid and context-dependent, as seen in symbolic–managerial overlaps in Somalia and Sudan’s transitional period or moral–coercive enforcement in Afghanistan and Yemen. The typology contributes to theory-building on state behaviour in humanitarian action and calls for further inquiry into the structural, ideological, and international political conditions that generate these patterns.
