Description
Today, many conflicts see traditional humanitarian organisations increasingly sidelined. In some of the world’s deadliest war zones like South Sudan, Yemen, and Gaza, aid delivery is undertaken not only by humanitarian organisations, but increasingly by military forces, private logistics firms, and security contractors. Strikingly, these actors are ‘weaponising’ the logistics of aid distribution to target civilian populations, fight insurgents, and govern territories. Logistics are the most heavily privatised area of contemporary warfare, and ever more where the blurring of boundaries between military and humanitarian operations takes place. Humanitarian missions have come to depend on the speed of logistics companies to deliver aid, much like modern wars rely on them to supply weaponry to combatants. Yet, warring parties mobilising humanitarian supply chains to fight adversaries are transforming war’s character and nature. While analyses of humanitarian logistics as instruments of counterinsurgency have begun to emerge in political geography, their implications for international conflicts remain under-explored in the discipline of International Relations (IR). In the field of Israel/Palestine studies, scholars have examined Israel’s control over key infrastructures such as roads and ports, and the use of humanitarian discourse to justify state violence against civilians. However, systematic analyses of Israel’s mobilisation of humanitarian logistics remains scarce. The primary aim of this research is therefore to investigate how during Israel’s 2023-2025 genocide in Gaza humanitarian logistics have been weaponised through the adaptation of civilian infrastructures for military use. This particular dimension of genocidal warfare in Gaza–which has created the conditions for mass killings and starvation while sidelining the United Nations system–signals a broader unraveling of the post–World War II liberal order and the emergence of an interregnum where emergent dynamics are yet to be fully worked out.
