Placing human security at the heart of C-IED responses highlights both the wider consequences of IED threats and the limits of what C-IED institutions can address alone. Some of the conditions that enable or sustain IED threats—including governance weaknesses, illicit flows, socio-economic vulnerabilities, and limited state presence— extend beyond the remit and capabilities of security actors. Reducing IED risks may therefore require interventions across several fields, without implying that all such interventions constitute C-IED.
The humanitarian–development–peace (HDP) nexus provides one framework for understanding these complementarities (Blancafort and Amoroso, 2026). Different actors can address different aspects of the threat environment according to their mandates and comparative advantages. Humanitarian actors may tackle exposure and consequences through explosive ordnance risk education, victim assistance, preparedness, and knowledge of population needs. Development and peacebuilding actors can contribute to infrastructure rehabilitation, governance and regulatory capacity, institutional resilience, and longer-term recovery. Arms control actors can provide expertise on explosives and precursor regulation, diversion, illicit flows, and supply chains, while security and justice actors retain responsibility for intelligenceled operations, investigations, judicial processes, and the disruption of IED systems.
These contributions may overlap without becoming interchangeable. Threat analysis, information management, preparedness, victim assistance, and international cooperation are all areas in which different communities of practice may hold relevant information or expertise. In practice, these interfaces can take different forms depending on the context and respective mandates—such as liaison arrangements, participation in relevant existing coordination forums, complementary assessments, or agreed mechanisms for sharing specific information where appropriate. Humanitarian actors may, for example, benefit from relevant threat information held by security institutions to inform risk analysis and preparedness, while security actors can, where appropriate, draw on humanitarian analysis of population needs, vulnerabilities, and operating environments. Such complementarities should be purpose-specific and designed to protect sensitive information, operational independence, and humanitarian principles.
Connecting these efforts nevertheless requires clear boundaries. A nexus perspective does not imply incorporating different actors into a single C-IED structure. Nor should every intervention that reduces IED risks be labelled C-IED. Humanitarian organizations, in particular, need to preserve the principles and operational independence underpinning their access to affected populations. The objective is therefore not to merge mandates, but to identify where activities can be mutually reinforcing while preserving institutional responsibilities and comparative advantages.
In practice, such complementarity may be difficult to achieve. Coordination challenges within individual sectors, differences in mandates and operating principles, and sensitivities around information sharing can limit the scope for structured cooperation. Complementarity should therefore not be understood as requiring formal coordination between all relevant actors, but rather viewed as a range of possible steps depending on the context— from greater awareness of respective activities and priorities to complementary analysis, appropriate information exchange, or more structured coordination where mandates and operating conditions allow.
Practical mechanisms can support this complementarity: joint or complementary analysis can strengthen understanding of threats and impacts; appropriate information-sharing arrangements can facilitate exchange while safeguarding humanitarian principles and operational requirements; and liaison and deconfliction mechanisms can support humanitarian access and reduce operational risks. For example, in an IED-affected area, security actors may share relevant information on changing threat patterns to inform humanitarian risk assessments and preparedness, while humanitarian actors may provide aggregated analysis of civilian impacts and access constraints. Such exchanges can improve the respective responses without requiring either community to share sensitive information or operate under the same coordination structure.
An HDP nexus perspective therefore broadens the range of interventions relevant to reducing IED risks without necessarily expanding the definition of C-IED itself. A contemporary C-IED approach requires recognizing both where the national C-IED response can act and where complementary humanitarian, development, peacebuilding, governance, and arms control interventions are needed.
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