High-Level Panel: The Future of Humanitarian Aid — International Cooperation Forum

On the erosion of international norms and humanitarian legitimacy

Moderator (Amb. Dominic Stillhard): If that gap between legal promise and political reality is growing, this is not just a humanitarian challenge, it's a geopolitical one. Are we witnessing a temporary erosion of international norms or a deeper structural shift, and if major powers themselves contest or selectively interpret international law, what does that mean for humanitarian legitimacy?

Thank you, and good afternoon. I'm thankful for the invitation and very glad to be here, and I want to just applaud all humanitarians everywhere who are really expressing the most precious impulse we have as human beings, and under very difficult conditions.

In 2022, just before Russia invaded Ukraine, I was in the Security Council and I made a statement that included the observation that multilateralism lay on its deathbed. That's what I said, and I hoped to be proved wrong, but in fact that was correct. There was already an accelerating trend of major powers seeking to be exceptions in their pursuit of military victory over other states and other actors, and that has only accelerated.

My understanding is that humanitarian law, and being bound by it, is really a foundational part of the global order established under the UN Charter. It didn't start there, it started long before, but it is a key part of that. That global order assumes that the rules and laws will be observed by enough actors that even though there may be specific, localized and regionalized crises, the global order will hold, and the humanitarians' job is to respond to those exceptional conditions here and there. But as we've just heard, the number of conflicts has doubled in the last 15 years, so what was just an exception has become really a condition. It's almost a crossing of a tipping point, and that tipping point is that the major powers and the regional powers increasingly want to be exceptional, increasingly want to not be bound by the rules that bound them or contained them to a certain extent for decades. And so when that happens, that rupture in the geopolitical system begins to overwhelm the humanitarians.

Structurally, it's not just a question of how to rally more funding, even though that is critical and has to be done, or how to reform these systems technically, that has to be done too, and I think it is being done. But it is the rupture in the global political system that is leading to this problem, and we have to come to grips with that.

Now, the major powers are not listening to me and saying, "my goodness, listen to what Martin said, let's amend our behavior." So what needs to happen, even as we talk about reinforcing these norms and undertaking political actions to reinforce them, especially in major political and military powers globally, is that regions have to step up. The Global South, and particularly Africa, has often seen itself, and been seen, as the recipient of humanitarian aid. But if you look at the direction of travel of the African continent in terms of its normative frameworks, there's a lot to build on there, that I'll go into later on in the panel; I don't want to make a whole speech of it. But to answer your question: this is not a temporary rupture, and if it is temporary, it's going to last for quite some time.

In the meantime, we have to have new countries, new regions, stepping up to reinforce these norms, understanding that they're doing it not just out of some abstract commitment but from self-interest, from the understanding that without these norms being observed and the humanitarian system having access and impact, they themselves, as states and as regions, will be deeply and negatively impacted for a long time to come. So the big players have exited the system, and the biggest one has exited most clearly, at least for the next few years. In the meantime, I think a number of us have to step up into that gap as owners, and not just as recipients, of humanitarian aid.

On the single most important change needed for the future

Moderator: What is the single most important change now needed to make the humanitarian sector, or humanitarian aid, fit for the future?

Very quickly: the problem is not with the humanitarians. There could be a lot of technical fixes, and they know what they need to do technically, how to reorganize money flows, how operations work. That's not what is most urgent.

The most urgent is for those of us who are not humanitarians to understand that the humanitarian system is a necessary companion for global and regional order, and that to rebuild those orders, the clearest consequence will be to how the humanitarian system operates. In other words, when it comes to Africa: if you look at Article 4 of the [African Union's] Constitutive Act, when it talks about the AU's authority to intervene in cases of genocide, atrocity, etc., each of those intervention points is actually a humanitarian crisis. In other words, a humanitarian intervention is part of the Constitutive Act; the humanitarian response is part of how the AU responds.

But so far the AU has thought of itself as responding at a political level, you know: send negotiators, etc., meanwhile the UN and other humanitarians will come and take care of the consequences of genocide and atrocities and mass displacement events. But if you rethink it, and understand that the humanitarian response is part of the African Union's structural responsiveness, then you may have the hope of building institutions that make humanitarian action more homegrown, more owned by states, of course these are states that often do not observe humanitarian law, not all of them, but many.

The journey to African integration, the journey to all the aspirations that Africans have for prosperity, open trade, open borders, etc., actually rests on the ability to operationalize Article 4, and to operationalize Article 4 you need to operationalize humanitarian action. Now, these are all conceptual, they need to be built, but it's not the humanitarians who need to build them. I used to be a political actor; it would be us who need to rebuild it, to allow the humanitarians more strength, more access, more safety, more neutrality.

On locally-led responses and global power dynamics

Moderator: If humanitarian responses were genuinely locally led, would that actually alter global power dynamics, or would deeper inequalities simply reproduce themselves?

The quick answer is that localization, as a subset of actions of what's happening at the global level, obviously has a lot of gains to be had, but in itself is not the solution.

To bring up a practical example: I think the solution is a new group of political leaders taking humanitarian action as an opportunity and an obligation, rather than an outsider action. When Ethiopia was going through its terrible civil war, my President, Uhuru Kenyatta, was one of the mediators of that process, and later of the ceasefire that was signed in South Africa, he was one of the principal mediators of that. And we had used our position in the Security Council very much to try and drive trust, that Kenya was a trusted mediator between the two warring sides.

President Kenyatta spent a lot of time trying to create access for humanitarian action, calling the TPLF or calling others to say there are trucks that need to go somewhere, there's a convoy of relief that is heading there, please let it through. It was that level of technical, very local engagement by him. He did it because, of course, it's an obligation to try and do that, but he also did it understanding that it was giving him an opportunity to engage in a non-political way, and present the issue as centering the protection of the people to the political actors he was talking to. So in engaging with humanitarian diplomacy, that's the term, he was able to basically open up a space of trust for himself, which he then translated into a political mediation for a ceasefire, enabling him and Kenya to be seen by two very suspicious actors as a neutral and well-meaning actor.

Now, the global system, and as a diplomat I used to find, and to this day I find, very little has been written or recognized about this particular set of interventions, because the understanding we have is not that African heads of state act in that way. We don't have that as part of the story of humanitarian success; we have African heads of state as completely political actors.

So I think we need a new constituency; we need to recognize these sorts of actions, we need to encourage them, we need to give them room, we need to open up conversations and processes amongst heads of state from outside the major powers, on reinforcing the norms and acting on them as an obligation and opportunity to regain peace and stability in the local region. For instance, if you look at the Horn of Africa today, the need for humanitarian action is overwhelming. Now, where are the heads of state and government engaging on humanitarian access and the protection of humanitarian action, opening up that space? That could only help in the delivery of local action in a way that empowers African agency. But as long as you see localization as a technical exercise of involving NGOs, this is very positive and important, but it is incomplete.

On the economic shift toward billionaires and oligarchy

Moderator: The last 20 years have been marked by economic shifts in favor of billionaires, undermining trust in Western societal concepts and institutions. Does the humanitarian sector have to become more political in an economic and social sense?

It's a very difficult question, honestly. But I want to speak up for the hotel sector, because absent capacity building, who knows what will happen to the entire sector; it is the lifeblood, including paying for mortgages, school fees. Capacity building is a very important revenue driver; talk about localization.

Look, there's a question about the billionaires, right. It is quite incredible, living in New York and not being a diplomat, because when you're a diplomat your citizens pay for your life, mostly, and when you're not a diplomat you have to pay it yourself. The amount of money it takes to live in New York is utterly astonishing, and this is just such high levels of inequality, and meanwhile, while you're struggling, of course, capital has become more and more privileged.

A few years ago I suggested to some friends that the fight against corruption had fundamentally moved, because our understanding of corruption is a public officer taking a cut of the money, or bending the rules for some business. But increasingly, the hyper-wealthy are not just looking for a cut of the business, they're not just looking for unfair contracts, they're not just looking for a playing field that is tipped their way, they want to own the whole thing. They want to own the decisions government makes; they want, essentially, the public interest to be subsumed totally to their private interest.

So corruption is no longer the issue, oligarchy is, and I think oligarchy is one of the most pressing threats to global peace and security. If you look at any of the crises that you humanitarians are dealing with, I bet you will find oligarchic action and interest at the heart of it. Whether it's driving minerals out of Africa, whether it is a sale of weapons, whatever it is, it is increasingly a small group of people taking over parts of government and disabling that government's ability to deliver the public good.

So the fight against oligarchs, and the fight against billionaires who behave that way, is really not just a fight for a few prosecutors here and there, it needs a global movement. Inequality is not merely unfairness, it is literally a threat to life and limb, and so I hope that movement for humanitarian action that has been talked about is part of a broader movement of re-owning the commons, reasserting public and democratic control of government. And just to finish: this incredible Epstein period we're living through is a constant lesson that impunity is really woven into so much of our governance class, the abuse of power, and at the heart of that abuse of power is wealth, wealth that is untethered from law or from ethics. So that is the fight that the world needs, literally, to save millions.

On adaptation markers in five years

Moderator: In five years, what would be the clearest sign that humanitarian aid has truly adapted to this new era we are experiencing?

Very brief, to build on the whole billionaire thing: remember who closed down USAID. That tells the story.

In five years, the United States will have rediscovered its deeper instincts of restraint and global generosity. In five years, the African Union will have invested part of its Peace Fund in humanitarian action, by launching an African humanitarian agency. In five years, the Peace and Security Council of the African Union will be taking tougher and tougher decisions on humanitarian access and safety. Those will be signals, for me, of success.