From Fragmented Responses to Integrated Approaches: C-IED and the Humanitarian-Development-Peace Nexus

By Manon Blancafort and Paul Amoroso

Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) continue to cause deaths and injuries, endanger communities, and undermine both development and recovery across conflict and crime-affected contexts. Attacks on civilian infrastructure, such as bridges, roads, and communication towers, isolate communities, prevent humanitarian actors from reaching those in need, and weaken the relationship between citizens and their security providers. IED use therefore not only constitutes a security issue but also disrupts humanitarian action, constrains development, and destabilizes peace efforts. As a result, responses to IED threats increasingly involve a broader set of stakeholders operating within the Humanitarian–Development–Peace (HDP) Nexus. This blog post examines how the Nexus can help structure responses from humanitarian, development, and peace practitioners already engaged in addressing IED threats, while preserving distinct mandates and principles.

Understanding C-IED in an evolving operational landscape

Over the past two decades, within fragile contexts, counter-improvised explosive device (C-IED) efforts have expanded far beyond their origins in military counter-insurgency. The community of practice has now evolved into a multi-stakeholder approach, which many countries have already embraced by bringing military C-IED units, law enforcement agencies, customs officials, policymakers, regulators, and civil society actors to the table. This diversification reflects the recognition that C-IED requires not only detecting, defeating, and exploiting the devices, but also a much broader ecosystem of activities, including risk education, victim assistance, infrastructure rehabilitation, border management, the regulation of precursor materials, and governance support.

In this context, the HDP Nexus has emerged as a framework that supports better alignment across sectors. It promotes coordinated action to address immediate needs while also tackling the structural drivers of fragility. Recent policy discussions increasingly point to the need to apply the Nexus approach to C-IED. The 2024 UN Secretary-General report on countering the threat posed by IEDs emphasized a whole-of-system approach within the UN, building on the 2018 Agenda for Disarmament. Similarly, the Anti-. Personnel Mine Ban Convention (APMBC) Siem Reap Action Plan (2025–2029) calls for enhanced coordination among states parties to overcome barriers and strengthen partnerships. A 2021 independent strategic review of explosive ordnance threats also showed that many field actors — including humanitarian organizations and peacekeeping mission components — stressed the need for better information sharing across communities of practice and for clearer prioritization in explosive ordnance threat mitigation.

In practice, however, these efforts often remain fragmented, with no common frameworks to structure coordination across communities of practice. Many actors pursue similar objectives but operate under different labels, mandates, and funding streams, which can in turn result in fragmented approaches, despite existing complementarities.

How C-IED overlaps with the HDP Nexus

Responses to IED threats inherently intersect with all three pillars of the Nexus (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 C-IED across the HDP Nexus

From a humanitarian perspective, IED threats directly affect civilian protection and access to affected populations. From a development perspective, IEDs undermine reconstruction, mobility, service delivery, and economic recovery. Within the peace pillar, they intersect with stabilization efforts, rule-of-law institutions, border management, and security governance.

Yet it is in relation to the peace pillar — where both ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ peace actors operate¹ — that tensions are most pronounced. Humanitarian actors remain cautious about engaging with peace actors, which could lead them to involve military or political entities and therefore risk undermining the neutrality and impartiality of humanitarian actions. At the same time, peacekeeping missions often lack the mandates, intelligence, or specialized capabilities required to effectively disrupt IED networks — capabilities that military or law enforcement actors could bring to the table. Cooperation with state security actors can therefore strengthen responses, but may also blur the boundaries between stabilization, counter-terrorism, and humanitarian action.

Despite these constraints, cooperation offers many benefits. Humanitarian actors can gain threat information from security actors, thereby reducing risks to personnel and informing the content of explosive ordnance risk education (EORE). Conversely, hard peace actors can learn from humanitarian experience in IED environments, especially in terms of understanding the human terrain in which IEDs are used and the enabling factors that facilitate their use within a threat environment. Cooperation between both communities of practice can also, for instance, improve victim assistance and medical preparedness. At the same time, preserving humanitarian principles does not preclude broader coordination aimed at addressing the longer-term impacts and enabling factors of IED threats.

Operationalizing the HDP Nexus for C-IED

Improving responses to IED threats depends less on blurring institutional mandates than on coordinating complementarities across actors from each pillar. Operationalization therefore relies on activities that strengthen coherence across responses, from upstream prevention to downstream recovery efforts. As illustrated in Table 1, in practice, this involves the following actors:

● humanitarian actors (H) focus on risk education, clearance, and victim assistance, while informing other actors about population exposure and needs;

● development actors (D) address structural drivers, including the rehabilitation of infrastructure, the regulation of explosive materials, and capacity building; and

● peace actors (P) lead efforts to disrupt IED networks, gather intelligence, and coordinate law enforcement investigations, while safely sharing relevant threat information with humanitarian and development actors where appropriate.

Table 1 Roles of HDP actors according to elements of the C-IED enterprise model

Note: ‘Cross-cutting’ refers to enablers that support both preventative and responsive C-IED efforts across all three Nexus pillars.*

Coordination between these roles can be facilitated through joint analysis platforms, information-sharing protocols, and planning mechanisms that respect humanitarian principles while enabling operational complementarity. Civil–military coordination frameworks provide models for navigating existing tensions and can serve as reference points. Establishing core components — such as a hierarchy of tasks, a liaison structure, and a mechanism for information sharing — can enable cooperation while safeguarding humanitarian principles. OCHA’s Humanitarian Notification System for Deconfliction (HNS4D), for example, provides a tool for sharing information, such as strike locations, explosive munitions used during military campaigns, and population movements, to enhance the safety of humanitarian operations and better coordinate mine action activities. If military actors undertake their own relief activities, these should be coordinated and communicated through this tool to prevent duplication.

Box 1 Nexus thinking in practice: South Sudan

A compelling example of Nexus thinking in practice comes from the Paving a 
Path to Peace initiative in South Sudan’s Jonglei state and Greater Pibor 
Administrative Area, which was responsible for reopening the 124-kilometre 
Pibor–Akobo road in 2022 after nearly a decade of abandonment due to conflict.
The project brought together the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS), 
United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) peacekeepers, and national 
engineering units to identify and remove explosive hazards, and to rebuild 
this key corridor near the Ethiopian border—reconnecting isolated communities,
facilitating humanitarian access, and supporting trade and mobility.

Towards more coherent responses to IED threats

While several structural constraints continue to limit coherence across humanitarian, development, and peace responses to IED threats, progress could be made in the following areas:

• Funding limits cross-pillar engagement if it is aimed at supporting structures that remain largely siloed across humanitarian, development, and peace frameworks. Donors typically channel resources through separate humanitarian, development, or security funding streams, leaving limited flexibility for joint planning or collective outcomes. Dedicated financing mechanisms could mitigate the risk of C-IED initiatives being ad hoc and dependent on personal networks rather than institutionalized partnerships.
• Institutional silos remain as agencies often lack a mutual understanding of each other’s mandates and operate under compliance frameworks that discourage cross-sector engagement and innovation. The result is a fragmented community that is not always ready or allowed to collaborate, and that receives limited guidance from the UN system — which, despite mentioning the Nexus core principles, still rarely addresses how to operationalize them effectively. Within the security community, for instance, neither the Agenda for Disarmament nor the New Agenda for Peace explicitly refer to the HDP Nexus. While the humanitarian community’s Grand Bargain Implementation Agenda (2025–26) refers to the HD Nexus, it excludes security actors. Strengthening mutual understanding across communities of practice could help ease these existing tensions.
• Humanitarian projects often last three to six months, while development and peace programmes usually run for one to five years. Coordinating these timelines is difficult, especially when funding and evaluation cycles are tied to incompatible planning. Closer alignment on programme planning, however, could lead to improved coordination in practice.

Conclusion

In this context, the HDP Nexus offers a useful framework for bringing greater coherence to current humanitarian, development, and peace activities involved in addressing IED threats. Much like whole-of-society approaches at the national level, the Nexus can help structure regional and global coordination across communities of practice operating within the same threat environment. The challenge is no longer whether these actors intersect in practice — they already do; instead, it is whether existing institutional structures, funding models, and coordination mechanisms are able to support that interconnected reality effectively.

Notes

[1]^ The term ‘soft peace’ (or ‘soft P’) actors refers to grassroots and community-based peace actors focused on trust-building and dialogue facilitation, while ‘hard peace’ or ‘hard P’ actors refers to those engaged in security, stabilization, and peacekeeping.

This blog post was produced with generous support from the Government of Japan. For more information on the Survey’s work on C-IED, please contact Julien Joly: julien.joly@smallarmssurvey.org.

Blog posts are intended as a way for various Small Arms Survey collaborators and researchers to discuss small arms- and armed violence-related issues, and do not necessarily reflect the views of either the Small Arms Survey or its donors.