In settings of humanitarian crisis, stories of ethical paradoxes and challenges inevitably surface, whether around a café table in Dohuk, Beirut, or Kampala. Aid workers’ standardized approaches to humanitarian assessment in Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan shape individual Syrian asylum cases by routinizing refugees’ stories and stripping out legally crucial personal details. Persistent freelance reporters chasing a new angle on the battle for Mosul underpay and endanger their local Iraqi and Kurdish fixers, prompting unionization efforts and limiting further coverage. Local aid workers in any number of conflicts contemplate the fact that they are paid far less than their foreign counterparts. These issues do not exist in a vacuum. Interactions both among war-adjacent professionals and between these groups and war-affected local populations shape the quality of aid provision, influence donor giving, and mold policymakers’ understandings of conflict. These types of interactions reverberate across organizational fields and war-affected communities, creating tensions, opening dialogues, and, sometimes, coalescing into new modes of thinking and behaving. In war-adjacent environments such as Jordan, Turkey, and Kenya how do individuals’ understandings of professional conduct interact with local populations’ concepts of ethical and moral behavior? How do interactions between “international” and “local” professionals in these fields—e.g., between European and Iraqi journalists or between American and Lebanese employees of a United Nations agency—shape outcomes such as reporting practices and provision of humanitarian aid? Focusing on humanitarian crises in the Levant and the Great Lakes region of Africa, this project uses multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with foreign and local professionals in Lebanon and Uganda to identify communities of practice, local innovations, and emergent ethical tensions. Based on a total of nine months of fieldwork in the world’s two most acute and active humanitarian crisis, this paper brings unique leverage to understanding the role of local context in shaping representations of conflict and aid provision while identifying some of the shared impediments to and opportunities for ethical practice.