Humanitarian and geopolitics overview.

Meeting of heads of state and government in London to support Volodymyr Zelenky after his altercation with Donald Trump on February 28 at the White House © European Union, 2025

With this issue 100 of the online magazine Défis Humanitaires, we want to celebrate with our readers this milestone of good editorial hope. Since February 2018, we have been seeking to promote humanitarianism in its geopolitical environment, noting that humanity is at once one and diverse, universal and multiple, with its peoples and their countries.

This is all the more true given that 300 million human beings are in danger for want of help, and 2 billion men, women and children are living in destitution and uncertainty. Yet humanitarian aid, which has already begun to decline, is in danger of falling even further. The future looks more uncertain and dangerous than ever.

Understanding and anticipating events is a prerequisite for effective action. Humanitarian action is a positive response to cruel events. To understand where we are today and where we’re going, let’s take a brief look at the 4 periods that have marked humanitarianism since the 1980s, and draw some useful lessons from them.

Humanitarianism where we come from, 1980-1989.

Contemporary humanitarianism emerged in the 1980s, during the Cold War, when the world was divided into two antagonistic blocs, East and West, the USSR and the USA, and their allies in NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The real wars were fought on the periphery, in what was then known as the Third World. This is where contemporary humanitarianism was born, and where it based its legitimacy and development on field action, often crossing borders without visas to reach populations in danger. At the time, I was involved in this adventure of solidarity in Afghanistan, which also applied to Cambodia and Ethiopia. We created a new model that became a benchmark.

Distribution of briquettes in Kamianka, December 27, 2024. Solidarités International

A world disappears, 1989-2001.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the disappearance of the USSR in 1989-1991, after a brief period of euphoria and universal peace, ushered in a new era with the first Gulf War and UN Resolution 688 to protect the Kurds of Iraq. Then the break-up of the former Yugoslavia and the war in Bosnia, and the genocide in Rwanda established humanitarian action as an essential international policy, leading to the creation in 1992 of DG ECHO, the European Union’s and the Commission’s humanitarian instrument. Faced with urgent and far-reaching needs, the humanitarian community expanded rapidly, particularly NGOs, which established themselves as a major player in crises.

The turning point of September 11, 2001.

The next turning point came on September 11, 2001, with the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York by the terrorist organization Al Qaeda. We remember George W. Bush’s doctrine of pre-emptive war against terrorism, and the UN Resolution authorizing the United States to intervene in Afghanistan, where it remained for 20 years, with the inglorious end that we know. We remember the American intervention in Iraq to “democratize the Middle East”, which was based on false allegations and had dramatic consequences.

The humanitarian dynamic will grow out of necessity, and will soon be stimulated by the Arab Spring, which will degenerate into civil war in Syria. We remember the Serval operation in Mali in January 2013, against jihadist groups, then in Burkina Faso and Niger. During this period, humanitarian action emerged as one of the essential components of any solution, along with its other security, diplomatic and political aspects. It was at this time that the concept of the Humanitarian-Development Nexus was born and flourished, to which the word peace was soon added.

BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia, in October 2024, attended by the UN Secretary-General. The world is reshaping itself! ©Agency brics-russia2024.

Sequel or change of era?

In an article entitled “From geopolitics to humanitarianism” published in Défis Humanitaires on July 24, 2019, I posed the question of whether this period was a continuation of what had gone before or whether, on the contrary, it heralded a new geopolitical and humanitarian cycle. A question all the more necessary given that Donald Trump had been elected in 2016, Vladimir Putin had been re-elected in 2018 as had Erdogan, the Turkish president, and Xi Jinping had been elected president for life of the People’s Republic of China in the same year.

To this question we now have the answer, which is the main focus of this editorial for the 100th issue of Humanitarian Challenges.

From Putin to Trump, or the great leap into the unknown!

The tipping point begins with Russia’s attack on Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and is confirmed with the election of Donald Trump, who takes office on January 22, 2025. Throughout the Cold War and beyond, war had been frozen in Europe. For more than 3 years, the war in Ukraine has meant that borders have been called into question, and the countries of the European continent, which had been slumbering, are rearming because of the threat of a possible extension of a conflict with the Baltic States and Poland, with the risk of a domino effect with NATO member countries.

This is the moment chosen by Donald Trump to propose that Canada become the 51st state of the USA, to invite Greenland to come under his control, to regain control of the Panama Canal and to seek to impose peace on Ukraine with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, while threatening that country and its allies in Europe with abandonment if they do not comply within a week!

Vladimir Putin & Donald Trump in Helsinki July 2018. (Image Credit Kremlin.ru via Wikimedia Commons)

The turning point that history will remember is here, and it’s here to stay. Possible challenges to borders, geopolitical deregulation, the law of survival of the fittest, the race for access to natural resources, the risk of confrontation that could spiral out of control, the weakening of the UN and paralysis of the Security Council.

And what can we say about the undermining of the Climate Agreement, the struggle for control of space, information conceived as a battlefield – the list is long, foreshadowing this change of era.
In this poisonous climate, the guarantee of freedom and independence for some countries, and of power and neo-empire for others, is leading to an exponential increase in defense budgets.

In the latest “Eurobarometer” survey, 66% of people rank protecting people as their top priority. The economy and industry came next (36%), followed by energy resources (27%).

The need for security has just led countries such as Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia to decide on March 18, in a joint declaration, to withdraw from the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel mines, ratified by 164 states!

As in previous periods, this will have a major impact on the humanitarian sector!

What about humanitarian aid?

Not only are humanitarian needs still with us, but they are set to increase, both because of the vulnerabilities that are flourishing (conflict, poverty, climate, water resources, demographics in Africa) and because of the drastic decline in resources.

The Trump administration’s dislocation of USAID and freeze on funded programs has caused, despite exemptions, a veritable cataclysm in humanitarian and development aid. All the more so as this shock was preceded by a sharp drop in official development assistance from many European Union and OECD member countries.

The main trend seems to be as follows: a rapid decline in funding, restricted or even inaccessible general access to populations in danger, with a retreat from International Humanitarian Law, more violence against civilians considered as protagonists and stakes in wars, politicization and criticism of humanitarian aid.

Mothers with their children wait at the MSF clinic in the Zamzam camp, 15 km from El Fasher, North Darfur. MSF

Let’s face it, this is a historic step backwards for humanitarian action. Although we started from scratch almost 50 years ago, we’ve been making progress ever since, but for the first time we’re taking a step backwards at a time when we were already struggling to meet the vital needs of populations in danger. The head of a humanitarian NGO recently told me that for his organization, this was a 10-year step backwards! The majority of humanitarian NGOs are having to reluctantly and urgently lay off some of their staff. The UN and its agencies are planning to regroup into 4 large entities, and even to relocate to cut costs.

If the humanitarian aid budget almost doubled between 2012 and 2021, it then briefly stagnated, and now it has been falling since 2023, and will increase and accelerate in 2025. What will happen next? Will there be a reaction, a halt, a stabilization at the very least, or, on the contrary, will the downward slide continue, and to what extent?

And yet, if the shock is conducive to the search for an alternative model, we don’t see a replacement solution on the scale. In any case, we need to acquire more influence and, ultimately, more audacity and imagination to invent the future.

A new mobilization in these changing times.

For the sake of completeness, we need to add to the geopolitics of conflicts, those of more numerous catastrophes and the risk of major epidemics.

How can we act in the face of rising extremes when civilian populations are seen as war targets and treated as enemies to be annihilated? This is the case in Gaza with the use of the weapon of hunger against an entire population; it’s the case in Ukraine with the systematic bombing of towns and villages and civilian infrastructures; it’s the case in the civil war in Sudan. This is the dehumanization of total war, in the face of which humanitarian aid must do everything in its power to fulfill its mission in spite of everything!

I can also see the growing debate between the national priority of security and international aid in its various forms. One is not incompatible with the other. I believe that we can be proud of our own identity, while believing that others can also be proud of their own nationality, while feeling concerned by the misfortune of others by providing them, as partners, with aid, skills, tools and knowledge useful for their development, and also learning from them. A country grows by making these choices of effective and respectful solidarity. This in no way prevents us from promoting the interests of our own people.

This is also why I believe that the ideological and partisan politicization of humanitarian aid will lead to its weakening. Let’s not fall into this trap. Humanitarian aid is indisputable when it is carried out within the framework of its principles of humanity, impartiality, independence and neutrality.
At a time when security is becoming a priority for public opinion and their countries, human security must be associated with it, all the more so as the insecurity of populations fleeing war, disaster and epidemics destabilizes their neighbors from near and far, through a domino effect that will eventually impact us too if we do nothing.

More concretely, there are deadlines that are as much at stake. This is the case in France, with the Finance Bill for 2025 and 2026. Political leaders must, at the very least, stabilize humanitarian and development budgets, or even revitalize them in the spirit of the recent Presidential Council for International Partnerships. Similarly, the 4th European Humanitarian Forum on May 19 and 20 in Brussels should be an opportunity to strengthen DG ECHO’s humanitarian aid, rather than diluting and weakening it. Finally, the Conference on Financing for Development in Seville next June could be the occasion for a new impetus, as well as a demanding “aggiornamento” (updating) to improve efficiency for populations and optimize private initiative for all.

We’ll be back in touch with you in early June with issue 101 of Défis Humanitaires.

Défis Humanitaires, with you.

One hundred editions since February 2018, 152 different authors of articles and interviews whom I’d like to thank here for their contribution, a growing increase in the number of readers, in France of course but also in order in the USA, Burkina Faso, Canada, Belgium, Mali, Switzerland, Senegal, the UK and Cameroon for the first 10. The most widely-read articles focus on humanitarian thinking, the humanitarian-development Nexus, funding and salaries, demographics and philanthropy.

In this chaotic and dangerous international context, Défis Humanitaires, a free and independent magazine, is more topical than ever, and we have many projects to propose to you. I therefore invite you to answer the questionnaire enclosed in this issue, which will be very useful to us, as well as to testify “A vos plumes” for Défis Humanitaires. We’ll be publishing these testimonials in our next issue in June.

Finally, with issue 100, Défis Humanitaires aims to evolve into an information medium with greater visibility and smoother navigation. To achieve this, your support (donate) will be decisive to better inform, alert and mobilize. This has never been as useful as it is today. If we don’t act, we’ll go backwards!

I’d like to thank you personally for your support and for this mutual commitment, which strengthens humanitarianism.

Alain Boinet.

I invite you to read these interviews and articles published in the edition :

So here we are

So here we are. The world before us has collapsed. Humanitarians who see the world through its sufferings could feel it coming, even if the brutality of the shock allows us to be a little dazed. It is all the more violent because the system, already under great external pressure, is collapsing from within. The budget cuts announced by many European countries gave us the beginnings of what was to come.

All of a sudden, we’re left with nothing. For a long time, report after report, we have all known that the concentration of humanitarian funding in the budgets of a small handful of donors represented a danger. Many efforts have been made to diversify, with little result. Why is this?

Development cooperation and humanitarian aid are so ingrained in our systems – the rich help the poor – that we forget why they exist. It’s not really a question of morality. States do not fall within the realm of morality, and if your government spends your tax money to give it to people outside the national community without any obvious return, it is because it has an interest in doing so. When this interest is no longer perceived or perceptible, then there is a problem.

Source: Official Development Assistance (ODA), OECD

America’s ruthlessness should not obscure the fact that many donor countries have been announcing budget cuts for months. But no one is giving any more. Why should we give to countries whose governments, and sometimes whose populations, no longer want to hear from us? Why should humanitarian aid, which is counted in the budget as official development assistance and financed almost exclusively by the countries of the political West, be perceived as neutral? For a long time now, humanitarian neutrality has only been perceived by those who provide it.

With a clear political objective in mind, development aid was designed to enable the least economically advanced, newly independent countries to compensate for the lack of a tax base that would have enabled them to invest in their own physical and social infrastructure. Some countries, particularly in Asia, did this and integrated into the world economy, while others did not. Development cooperation then became a way of getting the least developed countries to converge towards a Western model, not only in economic terms, but also in political and societal terms. Democracy, human rights, gender equality and so on. Can there be economic development and a reduction in poverty outside this model? It would seem so, as surprising as it may seem to us.

Historically, humanitarian aid came from private or religious initiatives. Governments then took over. Since we can’t prevent or stop war, let’s repair its consequences as best we can. Humanitarian aid is as much a reflection of the bad political conscience of rich, democratic countries as it is of our collective good conscience. Funded almost exclusively by government budgets, it has become an industry with no economic competition or ideological adversaries, and therefore resistant to introspection and reform. The marker of success was the constant increase in budgets, and the increase in budgets led to a concomitant increase in the field of humanitarian aid. This cycle has been broken, what are the consequences?

In eastern Chad, the WFP distributes food to new arrivals from Sudan. Photo WFP/Jacques David

The countries of the ‘South’, now very sensitive to external signs of sovereignty, do not want aid, but investment, the only way to stay afloat and develop economically. They have much more choice than before, and are mixing and matching their partnerships according to their interests, sectors and offers. Imagine a country negotiating arms and education with one partner, roads with another, and technical assistance with yet another. Humanitarian aid is rarely negotiated, but it comes largely from the same donors and players.

The countries of the North, now very sensitive to their spending, do not want to help, but to invest, as the only way of maintaining their geopolitical and economic standing. The focus seems to be on the transition from aid to investment, with this summer’s Seville summit on financing for development as the high point of the forthcoming reforms. This means that the focus will be on countries with economic development potential, and that the others will be satisfied with humanitarian aid.

This is how the ‘global Gateway’ model has mapped out a path that is the only valid and politically audible one. The ‘differentiated approach’ to be applied to the most fragile contexts is far from being defined, and it is no coincidence that ECHO is nominally in charge of it, nor that the Commission has postponed the development of an integrated approach to fragility. It is not a priority.

Source : U.S. Foreign Assistance By Agency, ForeignAssistance.gov

So what are we changing?

Aid reform cannot really avoid thinking about why we want to help and how. This is no longer intangible, and the arguments of the twentieth century no longer hold water, either in the South or in the North. Even if humanitarian budgets are better protected from cuts, solidarity NGOs will have to rethink themselves in terms that are audible. Preservation of values or creation of added value? What is on offer? Perhaps this is what we need to redefine, beyond the ‘capacity to manage programmes in complicated areas’ that defines the humanitarian world. Human solidarity still exists, and should continue to exist. Whether this necessarily translates into programmes for the distribution of goods or services on behalf of donors is perhaps open to discussion.

Of course, it’s the closest communities that make the first effort, and sometimes the biggest. Because they are there on the spot, because they themselves have been affected by a disaster or conflict, they mobilise. This effort is not standardised, but it is often adapted. Local organisations exist, and they mobilise all the better because they are known and recognised in the affected communities before the shock. In this respect, ‘localising aid’ is one of the biggest sea snakes in humanitarian aid. But the concept is flawed. Localising aid’ implicitly means that aid is primarily international, but that local actors – often conceived solely in terms of local NGOs – need to be involved. But if international players are providing essential volumes of aid, who said that they alone were responsible for helping victims everywhere? What if our role was not so much to ‘localise’ aid as to support local efforts on their own terms? Because the capacity of local players is built up in the same way as that of international players: by the number of operational responses they have decided on, managed, financed and evaluated, and by the number of mistakes they have made.

This is undoubtedly where one of the changes lies. At the level of mentalities. We need to ask ourselves who on the ground has the capacity to act and how we can help these initiatives, technically and financially, making the most of our technical and logistical expertise, rather like the many very local development NGOs that were very active in the 1960s to 1980s, before the humanitarian steamroller drained all resources. It’s a different approach, based on partnership rather than immediate action, but perhaps one worth exploring. Could we do it?

Cyprien Fabre is head of the “crises and fragility” unit at the OECD. After several years of humanitarian missions with Solidarités, he joined ECHO, the European Commission’s humanitarian department, in 2003, and held several positions in crisis contexts. He joined the OECD in 2016 to analyze the engagement of DAC members in fragile or crisis countries. He has also written a series of “policy into action” and “Lives in crises” guides to help translate donors’ political and financial commitments into effective programming in crises. He is a graduate of Aix-Marseille Law School.

I invite you to read these interviews and articles published in the edition :

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