2021 年 30 巻 2 号 p. 145-159
The international humanitarian assistance scheme has been reformed during the last three decades since the end of the Cold War. Due to the increase of internal warfare in the post-Cold War period originating from differences in social factors such as ethnicities, languages, and cultures, humanitarian assistance was required to transform from simply delivering goods and services for victims to addressing the root causes of conflicts. In order to do so, the international community has been discussing how to reinforce continuum from peace building to humanitarian assistance, then to development assistance. While some negative impacts by new humanitarian assistance have been pointed out such as the politicization of humanitarian assistance may be accelerated, the author rather takes the transformation as progress from his experience in actual humanitarian operations which is supposed to be politically agenda free. In order to combat increasing humanitarian crisis with limited resources, taking into consideration how to end humanitarian assistance in one place is inevitable.
However, in order to further improve the humanitarian assistance, negative impacts that the transformation has generated should be analyzed and preventative measures should be taken. One of the possible negative impacts is unfairness in assistance that may happen due to strong international attention to countries that require peace building assistance, mainly countries that have experienced internal warfare. While efforts to strengthen a linkage or coherence among peace building, humanitarian assistance, and development assistance have been actively sought, humanitarian needs in “peace places” might have been put aside.
This paper analyzes how the “assistance gap” occurs and how to prevent it from happening taking the Timor Island as a case study location where the international community has been conducting a full course of supports from peace building to humanitarian assistance and then to development assistance in its eastern half while its western half has not received any assistance.
