Conflict sensitive refugee assistance

Today, conflict sensitivity is a renown and established concept in the fields of education, development cooperation, and journalism. The concept is based on the assumption that every human action, well-intended or not, is a form of intervention in a certain context and, thus, interacts with it. In consequence, no action can be understood as neutral as they contain both, the potential to cause or intensify conflicts, but also the potential to promote and strengthen peace. Up to now, the concept has been mainly applied in professional contexts in former and current regions of crisis and conflict. The Berghof Foundation, however, perceives it as extremely valuable to apply it specifically to the field of professional and voluntary refugee assistance, where well-intended actions are often followed by misperceptions and frustrations that may culminate in the use of violence, instead of the envisioned outcome. The Berghof Foundation’s good experiences with a workshop format on conflict sensitive refugee assistance for volunteers engaged in the field in Germany and the affirmative feedback received by workshop participants, fed into the development of the two different formats of the model workshops on conflict sensitive refugee assistance in Jordan.

Authors

Dagmar Nolden, Cassandra Schützko