The humanitarian sector is set to change once again: the ‘humanitarian reset’ comes in the face of cuts to aid from government donors, most notably the United States. The wider political landscape continues to push back against gender justice, but a gender lens remains essential to effective risk analysis and delivery of life-saving humanitarian action, including protection.
Responding to this challenging context, this research seeks two main objectives.
- It expands humanitarian actors’ understanding of gender norms and their impact on humanitarian crises (with a focus on conflict) and humanitarian response by challenging the often uncritical deployment of gendered tropes (‘victims’, ‘perpetrators’ and ‘agents of ‘change’).
- It assesses how the humanitarian system could address the systemic features that drive this approach to gender norms and protection in the context of rising anti-gender politics and a crisis of multilateralism.
Ultimately, the paper encourages the sector to use the ongoing humanitarian reset as an opportunity to foster more nuanced, inclusive and effective humanitarian and protection action. Doing so is essential to avoid returning to a chronically insufficient back-to-basics approach, which would be a disservice to affected people and would almost certainly cause them further harm.