In many contexts, this made my life very easy, especially in Iraq. I came from the region, I was Greek Orthodox, so they could place me and understand me. They told me: “We can work with you. We don’t understand all these others who say they are atheist.” Even my hair color had an impact, because they could associate it with something, they didn’t feel I was a threat. There was a mutual feeling of: “I know you have to do your work, but I also have to do mine, so let’s find a compromise.” 

Myanmar is deeply Buddhist, just like 90% of my country’s population, but we never talked about religion. It was mostly about personality and the physical appearance. It was not white faces only, like in most organisations. When dealing with the Military and the government, the Head of Delegation used to take me with him everywhere, to show that we were not there to inflict them with white Western principles. 

White people don’t know that they have this natural bias towards other white people. In Asia it’s the same thing basically.   

When I say that I’m French, people don’t really believe me. Then when they realize that I understand the Western culture and speak French, they call me a banana. That’s what racism looks like in the humanitarian sector. 

Being non-Muslim was a positive thing; among the many ethnic and religious stigmas, I was perceived as neutral and independent. However, being a foreigner, you are not taken seriously, and it takes a lot of time to build the trust. You get the message: “You can never understand what happened before because you weren’t here.” 

Female Bangladeshi colleagues have been told in front of me in Bangla by local government officials: “You should be more amenable with me, because she [referring to me] will be leaving, but you are stuck here with me.”

I am very careful about the way I address people and I use words that are used by older people, that are very traditional. I try to blend into the culture more and not stand out as a millennial woman who’s speaking English around them.  

It’s challenging to be someone who is a local but is formed academically and ideologically by the West. It’s very difficult to find a balance between the two that can work in my context.

Also, Germans are perceived as being on time, working a lot and being friendly to Syrian refugees. Everyone knows Angela Merkel. So saying I’m from Germany helps, it’s a starting point of trust. They like Germans in general. They don’t ask for my religion, they assume I’m Christian.

But he said: “I don’t want Africans, I want Westerners.” So we were sent, two Brits and a German. We did 5 trips to the field over a month, and although we didn’t ultimately achieve what we sought, we made a lot of progress in advancing the dialogue.

For instance, in Palestine, being an Arabic speaker helped mitigate a lot of that, because they understand that you respect them if you speak their language. But it is true that this topic would systematically come up, and they would love to engage on it. The conversation could have gone anywhere depending on how I took it. My reaction would be to be apologetic, and say sorry for what my parents did. It all goes back to personality and how we [the negotiators] engage with the interlocutor.

There is a colonial legacy, but people remember the most recent one. Interestingly, South Sudan had fond memories of the Brits, and resented the Arab colonialism, which is the more recent one. If you think about the Ottoman occupation of the Middle East, when there also were terrible violations, they are beyond that because the most recent colonialists were the French, the Brits and the Americans. It is interesting how memory and politics shape everything.

The negotiation culture is also quite indirect. There is a certain maneuvering of talking about something without talking about it directly. My positive negotiations started with a lot of personal relationship-building. The first meeting, we didn’t even talk about what I wanted, but we had tea and talked about personal stuff. Then I found out I could go to him with requests, and it wasn’t an extensive negotiation every time.   

There are a lot of unspoken rules you are expected to adhere to. Sometimes it’s not even clear to our local colleagues either. Personality is also extremely important: it’s all very individual, very circumstantial. Some counterparts just hate humanitarians, some love us. It just varies so extremely from one case to the other. 

It pains me to say this, but we can play on misogyny, sexism, and flirt. You can let them joke about how many goats you are worth and other things that become icebreakers. If we are in a joint negotiation, I would let male colleagues use me as an icebreaker.  

It just opens ways to keep things calm, particularly in the case of military actors. I haven’t really reflected about if it works equally with civilian male counterparts. 

Being a woman has never been an inhibiting factor. I have never found anyone so reluctant to engage with me because I’m a woman, not even in conservative settings.

Once, I spoke to an Afghan leader of a military group. They guy didn’t want to look at me, so I had to sit with my back facing him. But it was a very “good” conversation. He took me very seriously. We had a substantive discussion, he was respectful.

I go in being hyper aware of this. I am definitely changing my personality, trying to be more polite and culturally sensitive. Being aware of how much is going against me, as opposed to against my male colleagues.  

There are so many patriarchal norms here that are so ingrained. It’s an issue of credibility. I generally feel that being a woman here is more of a disadvantage. I have gone to negotiations with my supervisor, who is older but still female. And the reaction she gets, it is the same kind I get, where they want to put you in your place: “How old are you, you look too young. Are you married? Do you have kids? What are you doing here if you have kids?”  

I remember once that I went to negotiate access to the camps during Covid, to open our facility to do minimum services. The local authority immediately asked where my male colleague was. Male managers get away with not having to maneuver like I do. They have an added credibility automatically by being older and male. However, knowing how Bangladeshi women are treated, they have it harder than me. Being international, European in particular, helps. 

In some scenarios, I have been able to negotiate services better by having a softer approach and being more polite, being more hyper aware of the cultural context, not getting impatient or easily frustrated. But these are the exceptions to the rule. I’m married, so I try to play the young mother card to build more trust. Somehow being married gives you a little more respect, playing up to being a family woman, a “good” woman. 

For instance, a big part of the beneficiaries are women and children and, because of local practices, it is difficult to get information from them if you are a man. There is no gender balance, when comparing the high number of women among beneficiaries and the small number among humanitarian workers. 

We lose a lot of information because of this lack of diversity. Humanitarian actors have to focus on the style of communication. When people talk about Africa, they describe a difficult context to work in, so managers don’t want to send women here. There is a lack of knowledge about the history; in certain tribes, women are described as legends in the history of their cities. But these stories of women taking the leadership are unknown. 

In Iraq, they told me directly that at first they had thought: “They are sending a woman? They are not taking this seriously.” Then they told me: “You are a strong woman, we like that, we respect that.”

However, my colleague didn’t really know what we could and couldn’t do, he didn’t have the necessary information. So, I tried to make my voice heard and, once the counterpart realized I had the answers, he actually started listening to me and interacting with me. At first, he would look at the floor, but towards the end he even called me by my name while looking at me!  

This team combination was also useful when visiting prison inmates. They started telling me about private and more intimate stuff, while to my colleague they were asking requests like: “Can you fix my shower?” Being both, it was great. If I had gone alone, they wouldn’t have talked to me. If he had gone alone, we would have missed the more private stuff, which is extremely important for one of the organization’s main missions.

When you join the organization and participate in managerial courses, there is no course or training related to diversity, be it regarding females, be it regarding LGBTI+. There is no approach to how to handle this. For me, this is a red line. If you want to be a manager, you need to have this cultural diversity. Before thinking of security measures, I want my line manager not to discriminate or bully me. We are looking at the last picture – negotiation – but are your staff from minority groups feeling safe and comfortable in your organization? No, honestly. I didn’t even come out to my organization out of fear of losing my job.  

My female partner is not recognized by my organization: for you to fill in the papers, you need to have your house, or your bill under the name of both. This is ridiculous because 80% of your staff don’t have this privilege. I’m not going to have an official paper where both our names are written. In third world countries, even male and female that are living together but not married won’t be able to have their names on a same official document. We are far behind. It’s all very white, Western-oriented. It’s regulated by laws that don’t apply to 80% of the world. 

I’m playing with the role of a female even if I don’t identify as female. Even within my organization, because they are way behind with these topics. I have been misgendered for years.

I identify as a trans male, but I am in an organization that does not yet have all the means to support minorities and make them feel safe. This topic is very sensitive to me. We have a lot of problems with diversity prior to reaching the negotiation stage. These challenges are back in our organization, before even addressing a third party. 

Turns out the problem came more from being from a humanitarian organization than from being a woman. It depends on these biases that our counterparts may have, which are often instrumentalized and not necessarily true. It was probably helpful that I was a foreign woman – this was true in certain countries in the Middle East. We are considered as some kind of “third sex.” You can do things that local woman can’t do, and also things that local men can’t do. 

For instance, I once had to negotiate in a remote area to distribute sanitary pads, which was very badly perceived. The head of the monitoring and evaluation team didn’t manage to talk to the local recipients of assistance because he was a man. I would wait outside while he was meeting the sheikh, and I talked to the women. As a woman, I could talk to the beneficiaries; as a foreigner, I could also talk to the sheikh. 

We did not prepare enough before the meeting. All of us were high level, and we didn’t agree who would speak, so we let the Country Director speak because he was older and more experienced. He didn’t have all the necessary information, so we weren’t clear in our petitions. We should have adapted during the meeting: if we were seeing it wasn’t going well, we shouldn’t have just asked for anything. It was catastrophic – we came out worse off.  

The interpreter was a bit confused, because everybody was asking something from him. We didn’t provide any added value. The next time we went, we printed some materials in the counterpart’s language, saying: “You can check what we are saying on page x.” This really helped us.  

The interpreter was really a liaison officer. He was from the same nationality and spoke the language of the counterpart, but he didn’t have the ideal personality for a negotiator. He was from a rural area, had a background in tourism. He was young, didn’t have the skills, was not trained in negotiation. We just expected him to interpret, not to negotiate, so we didn’t share with him a lot of information or background on the subject matter.

They understood that and it was very harsh. Even if you speak Indonesian, that doesn’t mean you will communicate smoothly. People don’t know the weight of the meaning of words. 

I could see that the military men were a bit offended by that, so I tried to de-escalate. At one point, the military guy asked me, because he thought I was taking the side of my delegate: “Why are you defending him? Are you Indonesian or what? How much are you getting paid?” I was perceived as a traitor to my country. 

Similarly, at one other moment in my career, I worked with a delegate from Switzerland. Even though she knows Indonesian, she is very “Swiss”. She is always on time and very rigid. While, in Indonesia, especially after a disaster, you cannot expect people to be always on time. People are too relaxed in the area, and it is not out of disrespect. You have to consider whether it is useful for you to talk about how late they are.

There is quite often a level of understanding of the humanitarian mandate and of working with humanitarians; they understand the basic concepts around humanitarian principles.

There are opportunities to connect on practical levels also. They may want to practice or show their English or want to talk about their time in America, which can be a particular reason to involve international staff profiles.

If they are managing a humanitarian response, they are at the front, so they are often more empathetic because they see what civilians are going through. When the civilian administration came in later, they only cared (it appeared for the most part) about paperwork and maintaining their position, especially when there is a vacuum of power.

So, she went herself to negotiate with her about GBV, to test how she felt about this issue. The reaction was totally different. Because the Program Coordinator wasn’t aware about the interlocutor’s religion and what she thought about this issue: they would not grant access for non-married ladies to a gynecologist, nor allow abortion or distribution of pills…

The counterpart was Christian and when she heard the word “abortion”, she got mad. This is not the topic we should have negotiated with them. The Program Coordinator didn’t “read” the lady, she didn’t have a relationship with her. On the other hand, if you are from the country, they will talk to you as a national, not as representing an international NGO. As a person from the same country, I could have had a side talk with this lady.  

You need to know not only the language, but also the words to use: you need to speak the counterpart’s language on certain topics. If you know she’s conservative, you present the topic conservatively. And this lady later helped me when I wanted something from the Ministry of Health; she talked to the director about me.

Considering this, it would have been better if I was a Christian. Luckily, the leader of a faith-based organization here is my friend from university, so dropping his name helped a lot. 

I would overcompensate this disadvantage with my story, my experience. I have been working for 7 years as a journalist in conflict areas. I used to live in East Timor during the conflict, so it is something I can relate to. “I was there, I remember that the commander at the time was X…” I show that I’m here because I’m experienced, not because I’m female or getting paid. And they are surprised: “Really? You were there? How old are you?”

It might be that humanitarians from other nationalities might have had to put a little more effort. 

In certain non-Arabic-speaking Muslim countries, when I met people from the government and other NGOS, they told me: “We wish we could read Quran in the Arabic language, which you can do.” These kinds of interactions transform the atmosphere into a more friendly one faster, so it could be that I have a privilege over other nationalities.

Due to MSF’s culture and its value of independence, we decided to go into some areas that the military didn’t agree with. During a freezing morning, I was having a coffee outside after an NGO meeting, and a young army officer approached me and started to introduce himself and ask where I was from, and where we were heading with the humanitarian assistance.

He tried to smoothly influence me to go into different areas, saying we would be safer… I changed the direction of the discussion by getting back to more personal issues and I found out that he had studied in Toronto. So I opened the door by saying I was Canadian and talking about life in Canada.

This kind of discussion reduced the level of tension and misunderstanding. After 20 minutes, we went back to the discussion of where we should go and he told me: “MSF, you are free to go anywhere, we don’t have the right to deny your access, you are independent.” 

Later, at another meeting, the chief of the army of the area responsible for the liaison with the cluster asked the representatives of the NGOs to introduce ourselves. After my turn, he stopped the presentation and said that before, when he was younger in a former conflict (in Bosnia if I recall correctly), he was rescued by MSF. So he was really grateful that MSF was there and assured us that nobody from the national authorities would pose problems for us.

My advice is to be transparent about not being an expert, show willingness to learn, and ask them to teach you. That’s a big source of legitimacy, even bigger than being an expert. Acting like an expert, you can come across as arrogant, as a representative of a colonial power. Showing respect is fundamental. 

Resident staff would question me: “Why are you here?” They have a certain ego where they feel they don’t need international organizations.

Before that, Libyans were a rich community with high profiles, they had people that worked for them. Now it is us who are in managerial positions, dealing with the interlocutors. It’s even worse if you are a female, and even worse if by any chance you are perceived as having a different sexual orientation or gender identity. 

Then I tell them: “I am not there to question, nor to investigate; I’m there to raise a few points to see how we can work together.” It helps to make the atmosphere more relaxed. Nobody likes to be attacked or questioned, so don’t go in with this mentality. 

Sometimes I go and I see someone acting immediately in a friendly way and it becomes a beautiful meeting. I’m very relaxed and spontaneous by nature, the sky is my limit in terms of how spontaneous I am. I make jokes and quotes, and the meeting is wonderful. On the other hand, when the counterpart is very serious, I make my points clear in a very friendly way. I would try to make negative points in a positive way: “I’m your partner, we work together.”   

My face gives that comfortable feeling, everybody tells me that. Being charming is an added value, whether you are a woman or a man. I don’t pressure by wanting to go out with any promises, but I open the door for a follow up discussion: “Let’s have a technical committee to discuss this more.” It’s a technique. The personality dictates who I approach, but it does not make me leave without what I wanted. This is why I like to read about the person before. It’s also good to read a lot about other things to have an access point, to start the conversation with something neutral before discussing the actual topic. 

You have to stay very calm; you have to do some self-regulation. When you have seen a tortured prisoner, this is of course very hard. I’ve done a lot of interpreting before, so I see my relationships with other people as some sort of interpreting.

You are reading, analyzing, absorbing information and then you have to interpret it, analyze it, understand why it’s happening, and see what chances you have of affecting the outcome. Then you have to translate into a language that your counterpart can understand. A lot of energy goes into this process. 

It goes into you, it’s very exhausting, because you have to engage with a person that’s inflicting suffering on others. It’s an incredibly challenging process. That is where emotional self-regulation comes in. You need to find ways to be very pragmatic.

When I was in the lead, I always tried to have a team who could also contribute based on their own negotiations experience. I don’t expect to know everything in the negotiation, so I would delegate to my colleagues. I don’t like technicalities, I don’t memorize them easily, which is a limitation but also a strength. I would always try to find a compromise.  

I had a boss that expected me to be tougher. He was trying to make me more of a mature negotiator. I never bought in, because maturity comes with knowledge and from personal experiences. I don’t think I can skip phases. It’s visible if you try to push it.  

For certain people, negotiation is about performing. For me it is not like that; I just want to be myself. If this means I can’t negotiate everything, that’s fine.  

My advice would be not to change your personality throughout the negotiation. If you need the negotiator to be harsher, consider putting somebody else instead. Negotiation is an art.

It also depends on the stage of the negotiation. At a first meeting, it is going to be so different than if you have actually built a relationship. One of the main challenges is where there is constant rotation of interlocutors, because the relationship-building element is very important. How you interact with someone in the first five minutes of a meeting is very different.  

I would always try to be straightforward – which is slightly different to honest, which has a connotation of full disclosure – by trying to be transparent about my objectives of the meeting. I try to be of added value to them, because I am aware that they have their own wishes and agenda. Also, it is always me who is asking for the meetings, which starts you off on a different footing. We need to make something appealing to them.

We need to allow them their space, allow them to perceive themselves in their way, not treating them solely as the international community perceives them.  

The psychological background is thus very important. Negotiations are often at the very local level, at the parallel checkpoint level, so it comes down to having conversations about where their family is since, due to the conflict, they might be struggling somewhere else in the world. You play to their individual circumstances and try to humanize the situation in order to gain access.  

It is essential to understand the behavioral competencies, the defaults of these communities. In Yemen, we completely underestimated the pride factor. I have worked in the Middle East for the past 6 years and I’ve never seen pride as in Yemen. If you push them against the wall, if you don’t acknowledge their pride and don’t give them the opportunity to save face, they will completely reject and retaliate.   

However, this Works both ways. Why does my organization have a good reputation locally? If we don’t give the authorities X or Y, we will be antagonizing them, but we will also be well respected. Why? Because we hold a firm position. Being consistent and being firm, the authorities begrudgingly respect that we also have pride, that we remain true to our aims. Even though we don’t always agree, they respect us for holding our lines.

We thought they would have a very rough, strong personality (or cultural identity), due to their way of living, the lack of commodities, the tough weather… They are people from the mountain.

But when the discussions started, we realized that they were very calm and respectful. I didn’t face any direct or indirect threats, but after 3 months, the government officially said that the NGOs had to leave the country. They knew there were Taliban in the country, maybe they were putting pressure on the government for Westerners to leave. 

Before leaving, a young man told my translator that he wanted to discuss with me: all his life, going to the mosque almost every day, he was always hearing that Westerners were the incarnation of the devil.

He told me: “For the first time, I see you here distributing aid to my people, and I am questioning that.” This helped me understand the perception from the other side, their worldview. Our presence there was strongly shaking their values and beliefs.

That was a revelation to me. It made me humbler to recognize there’s a lot I don’t know about them and about any interlocutors in general. That is why it’s very important to rely on people who know the area, to take your time to understand and have bilateral conversations with people who know. 

We never negotiated directly with criminal gangs. But if you go to an area where they have to allow you to go in, you have to be very clear about your impartiality, that you’re not there to spy on them and that you will not relay information about them or their activities to those that may use it against them. If that happens, the civilian population you have been engaging with is the one that will suffer. If you convince them that the projects are for the better of the community, as long as they don’t “sabotage” (too much) their objectives, they will let you access. You need to know what you can push and how far you can push it.  

What I was wary of the most were law enforcement officers; police officers. The army is still more structured, they still have a clearer modus operandi and command structure even in countries where they could be engaged in violations of human rights. But policemen and police units are not as organized: they can be more corrupt. Individual policemen can act more on their own and get away with it – at least that is my experience. Although I must admit that nothing has ever gone terribly bad.  

Do I think that if I go into a meeting with this perception, like walking on eggshells, this has an impact on my negotiation style and makes the negotiation less successful? I am not sure. With the police, it makes a difference being a woman and petite and young. It’s almost as if I know what they are thinking. You feel it in this kind of dismissal: the attention of the officer is on other things, he makes little space for a conversation, he gives you orders, “this is as it is”. Or he flirts with you. It depends. This is communicated in the first five minutes. With them, I try to be polite but also assertive. If I’m being pushed around, I try not to convey any nervousness. 

They are a tough group. I know in many organizations they make sure to almost always send a guy to the police station.

The army was part of the Bangladeshi peacekeeping missions, for which they received training. They were the first responders to the Rohingya crisis, they were seen as humanitarians at the beginning and, most importantly, they see themselves as part of the humanitarian response. On the other hand, local authorities here are very bureaucratic. They rotate every six months, which makes it very difficult to have to build a relationship with someone new every time. But then, if you have a difficult one, it’s also good knowing he will be leaving after six months. It is a very different culture.  

However, I always try to be very self-aware during the planning phase of my negotiations. After so many negotiations, you do start making assumptions and value judgements. “This local authority is probably going to be a toughminded male – if he’s young I know he’s going to try to prove himself…” I love it when I am surprised, and my assumptions are challenged.

I would encounter this quite regularly, surprisingly more in the institutional settings, where there are rules and protocols about this. 

I have been confronted to sexism long enough in my career, so I have developed a practice or an ability to suck it up when I need to suck it up. An ability to de-escalate by anticipation, turn it into a joke, and not something that becomes more serious than it could be.

In the humanitarian sector I have reinforced this ability because you have an agenda. Don’t become angry because that will defeat your objective of getting that paper signed or getting to meet that person. It’s very easy to be labeled as “that angry woman who can’t take a joke”.

Humor has always been a good tool for me to de-escalate. The objective shouldn’t be to change your counterpart’s mind – you won’t turn them into a “not sexist” by that one meeting. So, I would try to diminish the impact so that I can keep the relationship with that person.

Now that I’m married to a feminist, I know. You don’t know about the problem until you know you are causing one.  

I have very often worked with female interpreters. Quite often the fact that they are female has been an advantage or disadvantage. Occasionally it’s a disadvantage, because the men have been offensive to them without me knowing. On the other hand, in Iraq, the counterpart liked our female interpreter and that was a benefit to us. He was fond of her, which helped our negotiation. 

With Ansar Allah, you go in knowing that you’re going to get weighted down. You never feel like you have had a ‘win’. Nothing you can do is right. Early on, of course I hoped that I would be able to find some common ground or icebreaker. But there’s just nothing. 

So, you quickly get used to the fact that you’re going to walk out feeling like you didn’t achieve anything no matter what. But sometimes there are breakthroughs, and you just cannot know what to attribute them to.

In one instance, I walked out feeling very despondent but a few days later, what we were concerned about suddenly went away. And you cannot pin it to that particular conversation, because several are going around at once. 

If I had been a man, it would have been hard for me to reach out to her. When a male delegate went there with me, she was not really comfortable, and she kept talking to me instead.