The European Union and, later, the U.N. deployed peacekeepers to protect the camps. By 2008, the refugee camps in eastern Chad had become a self-contained society, one of the biggest and seemingly most permanent in all the world.

It was also a major reason why the Darfur conflict continued to rage five years after it had begun. Armed groups waging battle with Khartoum and its militias used the camps as safe havens and recruiting pools. Inadvertently, the U.N., EU and aid groups had taken a side in one of the world's worst conflicts, thereby prolonging it.

"Those camps do fuel conflict, no question about that," Marshall Wallace, director of the Massachusetts-based nonprofit Do No Harm project, told World Politics Review. "This is not uncommon. These camps get co-opted by warring parties." 

Through Do No Harm, founded in 1993, Wallace and his staff of researchers are attempting to create an analytical framework to help humanitarian relief workers understand the ways their interventions might fuel conflict, rather than just mitigate it. Do No Harm's philosophy and practical approach are gaining acceptance across the rapidly expanding fields of conflict prevention, peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance. The eventual result could be a smarter and more-tailored approach to aid work. 

"Really, the first thing people should be aware of going into these situations is that there will be attempts by warring parties to corrupt them," Wallace said. "This is a large failing on the part of the international community, this refusal to realize there will be an attempt to co-opt them. Fighters are not stupid. These [camps] are resources in the battlespace. They will make use of them." 

For aid groups, the important thing is to understand the potential for such co-opting in a particular conflict, Wallace said. That's no simple matter. "Conflicts [are] complicated, they're chaotic. There's a lot of information coming at you," he said. 

To begin conceptualizing these complex, fast-evolving environments, Do No Harm recommends that humanitarians first regard them through the lens of "dividers and connectors."

"By looking at conflicts and asking what are the dividers, or the causes of tension, and what are the connecters, or people trying to find ways to interact and create common ground, you see how any assistance program is having an impact on both," Wallace said. "You can start to see where you're feeding into the war."

In eastern Chad, for instance, the U.N. and its associate groups might have anticipated attempts by resistance groups -- dividers -- to use refugee camps as bases. Having understood that, the U.N. could have taken steps to reduce the risk of co-opting. Drawing media attention to the armed groups' camp recruitment might have helped the U.N. solve that problem. In more immediate terms, the U.N. could have made efforts to make its camps less resource-rich and thus less attractive as resistance bases. 

Perhaps camps should be "rougher," Wallace said. "Don't dig a well," he proposed. Rather, deliver water by truck -- just enough for the camp's permanent population and no more. "It's hugely expensive, but it underscores that this [camp] is temporary" and not meant as a base for armed groups. While seemingly cruel, such deliberately imposed hardship "is part of being serious about finding resolution for these conflicts."

Wallace stressed that solutions will be different for each conflict. Building analytical tools capable of arriving at tailored solutions to diverse conflicts required extensive field research by Do No Harm's many contributors. "We started this project by writing a bunch of case studies," Wallace said. 

In late 2006, aid worker Mark Canavera wrote Do No Harm's case study on Burkina Faso, a West African country that, unique among its neighbors, has not experienced serious internal conflict in recent decades. Canavera's study aimed to "look more closely at the strategies and mechanisms in place that allow Burkinabè people to peacefully co-exist across divides of ethnicity, geography, family, religion and political party." 

Traveling across the country with a team of colleagues, Canavera reported a "spirit of forgiveness" and dialogue ingrained in the country's culture. In essence, Do No Harm identified a nation of connectors, and examples of the kinds of partners aid workers should seek out in conflict zones.

Thanks in part to Do No Harm, aid workers around the world are getting more sophisticated in their understanding of conflict, Wallace said. "The basic idea -- that if you bring assistance into a conflict zone, it can become part of the conflict -- has spread across the world. Everyone accepts that."

"In 2010 there's no excuse for naivete," Wallace added. "I do think we can certainly do better. It all stems from an acknowledgement that we know we will be co-opted and that we must do what we can to mitigate that. Then we start thinking about solutions. Every situation in context will be different." 

But the goal is the same: more effective humanitarian work that reduces conflict more than it fuels it.