The HE Corpus contains 365 occurrences of Do No Harm. In addition, 28 occurrences of DNH, an established acronym for this concept. Occurrences of both the full expression and its acronym were considered for the purposes of this linguistic analysis.

The HE Corpus contains a quite large number of contextualised definitions for Do No Harm. This means that, even though no definition in an encyclopaedic style was found, humanitarians provide accounts of their understanding of Do No Harm applied to their activities.

As for parent concept descriptions, Do No Harm is fundamentally conceptualised as a principle, an approach and a type of analysis. Other less relevant parent concepts include framework, tool, priority, idea, foundation of community-based protection, humanitarian imperative and important touchstone.

A selection of 40 contexts provides a sufficient body of information for the purpose of piecing together the intension of Do No Harm in the humanitarian domain, i.e. what it entails for humanitarians.

In 5 contexts, humanitarians provide information about the origin and the notional nature of the Do No Harm. Do No Harm was developed by Mary Anderson in the late 1990s as a notion derived from medical ethics, being also referred to as a hippocratic concept. It is connected to the concepts of security, protection and sustainability (both temporally and environmentally).

Do Not Harm implies that humanitarians have become aware of their influence and the potential negative effects of humanitarian action. Even though the objective of humanitarians is essentially to help people, their well-intentioned actions may have negative unwanted effects. A group of 9 contexts confirms that humanitarians understand Do No Harm as a precautionary approach in delivering assistance with a view to evaluating and avoid unintended negative effects on the people they assist.

A selection of 16 contexts are more specific and go beyond the unintended negative effects of humanitarian action by focusing on conflict. Do No Harm is mostly associated with the concept of conflict sensitivity. This means that humanitarians operating on the principle of Do No Harm have to assess and understand the divisions and tensions between people and the capacities for violent conflict within the society in which they work. Do Not Harm therefore rests on the realisation that humanitarian assistance takes place within a political context, and that humanitarians run the risk of exacerbating tensions and deepening conflicts.

To understand conflict dynamics in a society, humanitarians should conduct and comprehensive and analytical conflict-mapping of the contexts before intervening. In 3 contexts, Do No Harm is described as a type of analysis or assessment necessary to prevent humanitarian-driven conflict. The following contexts provides a good example of this type of understanding:

Other humanitarians extend the notion of Do No Harm to the environmental impact of their activities. This extension can be seen in 4 contexts. Taking the environmental impact of an organisation's activities into account requires not only a conflict assessment but also an environmental impact assessment.

When describing Do No Harm, humanitarian appear to mostly focus on avoiding conflict and unspecific unwanted effects of their intervention, with 16 definitions centred on conflict and 17 definitions based on negative effects.

The majority of definitional efforts were found in documents published in Europe by NGO and C/B organisations. In terms of document types, 21 definitional elements were obtained from general documents, 10 from activity reports and 9 from Strategy documents

Although Do No Harm (DNH) is a very specific concept, it gives rise to many other compound concepts, i.e. concepts formed by combining 2 or more concepts. It is therefore necessary to look into the nature of these combinations to further understand the role of Do No Harm in humanitarian discourse.

A total of 25 conceptual combinations with Do No Harm was extracted. These were classified into three broad conceptual categories:

1. Parent Concept;

2. Dissemination; and

3. Implementation.

The first category is made up of 7 parent concept descriptors of Do No Harm. As discussed above, these include Do No Harm principle, Do No Harm approach, Do No Harm concept and Do No Harm tool, among others. The second category contains conceptual compounds that designate dissemination activities, e.g. Do No Harm programme, Do No Harm workshop, Do No Harm training, etc. Lastly, the third category includes conceptual combinations associated with implementing or integrating Do No Harm in the programming and activities of a given organisation, i.e. putting Do No Harm into practice. Examples of implementation compounds include Do No Harm framework, Do No Harm analysis and Do No Harm checklist.

Below is an interactive visualisation that allows you to explore the 25 conceptual combinations. Use the top buttons to navigate between category and concept levels in order to explore individual concepts. You can also use the filter option on the right to focus on a specific conceptual category.

This analysis of conceptual compounds shows that humanitarians are mostly concerned with:

• notional discussions about the concept of Do No Harm;

• teaching other people about Do No Harm; and

• putting the principle of Do No Harm into practice.

Frequent words that accompany a term are known as collocates. A given term and its collocates form collocations. These can be extracted automatically based on statistics and curated manually to explore interactions with concepts.

Comparisons over time between organisation types with the greatest number of hits (NGO, C/B, NGO_Fed, IGO and Net organisations) prove to be meaningful. Below is an histogram for the top yearly collocation for each of the five organisations with the greatest contribution as well as across all organisation types.

Occurrences of Do No Harm were highest in 2015, although 2019 obtained the highest relative frequency recorded (196%).

Europe generated the greatest number of occurrences but ranks second in terms of relative frequency with 100%. Asia obtained the highest relative frequency with 105% with comparatively fewer occurrences.

The top 5 organisation types with the highest relative frequency of Do No Harm are WHS, C/B, Project, Net and NGO.

Activity reports provided the greatest number of occurrences. However, Strategy documents obtained the highest relative frequency with 368%.

Occurrences of Do No Harm are limited in number for automatic synonym identification. Manual identification managed to extract only two expression treated as synonymous: conflict sensitivity and beneficence.

The HE Corpus contains 5 occurrences of conflict sensitivity joined to Do No Harm with an oblique stroke. This indicates that both concept are treated as synonyms.

It is no surprise that some organisations choose to treat both conflict sensitivity and Do No Harm as equivalents. As discussed above, humanitarians mostly focus on conflict avoidance when defining Do No Harm.

The principle of Do No Harm also appears to be linked to the principle of beneficence in research ethics, i.e. to do good.