This brief provides an overview of lessons learned about food security in protracted crises, drawing on both interdisciplinary academic research and reflections “from the field”. These insights provide a deeper understanding of threats to food security and actions that can be taken to help individuals, groups (including households and communities) and systems (social, environmental, economic and political) manage and resolve protracted crises. Governments are becoming more proactively assertive in developing and leading initiatives to address the underlying causes of protracted crises and to address their tragic manifestations. There are increasingly sophisticated understandings of how poor, marginalized and at risk populations manage risk and vulnerability. There is growing evidence of the positive effects of peacebuilding on protracted crisis and of conflict-sensitive food-security programmes on peacebuilding. Encouraging innovations in humanitarian and development practice include meaningful and strategic coordination, more effective transitions within national and international humanitarian and development cooperation, and the development of a broader set of interventions to address all aspects of food insecurity in protracted crises. Lessons have been learned about areas for improvement. This includes a stronger focus on investing in agriculture in protracted crises, more effective strategies for protection of people and their assets, the importance of humanitarian principles, and the challenges of supporting and rebuilding institutions eroded and destroyed by protracted crises.