Two hundred children were killed by Israeli airstrikes on Gaza in just 72 hours last week, while all life-saving aid supplies, and water has been cut off. Progress on a ceasefire in Ukraine is hitting obstacles and South Sudan’s fragile peace is teetering on the brink of collapse. US bombs are once again raining down on Yemen, war continues to ravage Sudan, and M23 rebels are carving a path of violence through the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). 2024 was, on top of all this, the deadliest year for aid workers on record. Amid growing global disorder, Western donors are pulling back from a humanitarian system that is overstretched and under attack.
Martin Griffiths, recently appointed as a new IDS Honorary Associate with the Humanitarian Learning Centre, has a stark diagnosis: we’ve entered a world gone mad. On 19 March 2025, Griffiths – the Former Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator of the United Nations – addressed IDS at a Sussex Development Lecture on ‘Humanitarian diplomacy in a world gone mad’.
His message was clear: we are at a turning point, with conflict growing and peaceful resolution declining. But for those in the aid world, now is not the time for retreat, but to build and advance humanitarian diplomacy; reconnect with human rights; make full use of available legal instruments; and be even clearer about our values.
Humanitarians need a plan
For Griffiths, Humanitarians need a blueprint – a plan to fight rising impunity, counter a resurgence of far-right extremism and the unprecedented threats it brings to multilateral cooperation. We have seen this culminating in an era of chaos politics, driven more by public posturing than principled leadership. Indeed, Trump’s disruptive approach to security, diplomacy, and development has, in-turn, influenced European governments to pivot sharply towards defence spending. In Britain, we saw this first in cuts to an already overstretched aid budget, which was soon followed by further reductions in welfare funding.
Yet some signs of resilience endure. Griffiths pointed to the UN’s relief and works agency for Palestinian refugees in the near East (UNWRA)’s surprising success in attracting substantial private sector funding, demonstrating that solidarity and humanitarian values still find resonance among organisations and individuals.
Supporting people on their own terms
Although the system currently operates at roughly half of its previous capacity—around $16 billion per year by our estimates—this figure, though historically high, is overwhelmed by the unprecedented scale and number of contemporary crises. The pressing challenge, therefore, lies in fundamentally reimagining humanitarian aid—not merely as a mechanism to “contain” emergencies, but as a means to support communities transitioning towards more dignified futures on their own terms.
Today, then, the global aid apparatus stands at a crossroad. Over previous decades, government funding has tethered humanitarian action to donor-driven priorities and bureaucratic conditions, often without meaningful local impact. Moreover, even though local humanitarian workers constitute 80 percent of the global workforce, their voices and insights remain persistently marginalised, despite widespread rhetoric emphasising localisation.
The sector’s identity crisis
Any renewed vision for humanitarian action must grapple with the sector’s identity crisis—a crisis exacerbated by decades of professionalisation that diluted its original radical ethos, sidelining humanitarian diplomacy and activism in the process. This fragmentation has restricted humanitarian actors’ potentially crucial roles in mediation, conflict resolution, and international law, weakening coalitions for transformative change.
It is worth recalling that humanitarian space was forged not through conformity to prevailing politics, but through activism and advocacy promoting what were, at the time, radical ideas—from universal rights extending equally to enemy combatants and civilians alike to even the very idea of “caring” for strangers in faraway places.
Forging a new humanitarian agenda
The Humanitarian Learning Centre at IDS, in collaboration with Griffiths and others, will forge a new agenda that connects research to practice, uncovering the root causes and systemic drivers of global humanitarian (dis)order while seeking strategic paths forward to defend and reshape the humanitarian endeavour. Now is the time, for as Griffiths rightly warned, “if you don’t stand up for what you believe in, you won’t be believed when you do.”