Samenvatting

Ten years into the post Cold War era have shown many humanitarian disasters caused by war. In the wake of these disasters many relief organizations emerged to give humanitarian aid. Nowadays, there is a great variety of actors working in the field of humanitarian operations in order to cope with the demands made by the security environment of the 21st century.The players in the humanitarian field have many origins: international military and civilian organizations, like the United Nations, whose members are nation states; non-governmental organizations (NGOs), like Memisa or Médecins sans Frontières (MSF); the International Committee for the Red Cross; transnational corporations; and the authorities of host nations.They are in fact any group that has the will and the potential to help in specific crises. All the organizations providing aid in crises have their specific working field, operating along side each other and, where and if necessary, collaborating with each other. They are in some instances very different from each other and often they are not traditional collaboration partners at all. Two reasons seem to account for the growth of organizations in this area and the resulting non-traditional coalitions that are necessary. Firstly, the transnational characteristics of the new security issues require another division of labour in which neither the military nor anyother single organization or nation is able to solve the problems on its own and a multi-actor approach is called for. Consequently, a wide variety of civilian and military actors, who generally have not met before, find themselves working on a shared problem. Secondly, because of the uncertainty amongst the traditional players regarding the approach to the new security issues, new actors have stepped into the void. In this article the authors will examine one field of such non-traditional multi-actor collaboration: the militarys relationship with civil organizations and institutions in humanitarian operations.