Humanitarian professionals are on the front lines of today's internal armed conflicts, negotiating access through physical and diplomatic roadblocks to reach imperiled civilians. This volume provides a compendium of experiences presented and analysed by 14 senior humanitarian practitioners who led humanitarian operations in settings as diverse as the Balkans and Nepal, Somalia and East Timor, and across a time frame from the 1970s in Cambodia and 1980s in Lebanon to more recent engagement in Colombia and Iraq.