The Work of
Staying Human
Humanitarian action beyond politics, funding, and false solutions
Article by Tom Corcoran
2,500 Words
Published by ETHNOMAD
Fading Cultures Magazine
January 1st 2026
Discover Our Work www.ETHNOMAD.com
I caught up with a close friend earlier this month. He arrived late in the afternoon after a long drive across the country from Geneva to the west of France. By the time we sat down to eat, the kitchen smelled of chilli and tomato, a rough margherita pizza with whatever was handy thrown on, the same simple meal we relied on during our college days, when the world felt complicated but still manageable.
We talked the way we always do. About the places we have worked. About crises that never seem to resolve. About politics, funding, and the quiet exhaustion that comes from watching the same patterns repeat themselves across different countries and decades. Then, on the positives: the people we met and the many inspirational moments of human survival and caring that few in this world ever get to see. For people who have spent their lives moving between humanitarian emergencies, these conversations have become almost ritual.
What changed this time was the purpose of the visit. He had come not to talk about the world’s crises, but to think through his own future. Gradually, almost reluctantly, the conversation turned inward.
He has spent most of his adult life working with refugees. For the past decade, he has been based in Geneva, but rarely still, moving from one crisis to the next, from briefings to field missions, shaping programmes that restored dignity, stabilised families, and changed lives in ways that would never appear in reports or headlines. Much of that work now sits on his CV under institutional headings, his own role folded quietly into the success of the organisation he helped build. He never expected recognition. Humanitarian work trains you not to look for it. What he did expect, perhaps without ever naming it, was that commitment and experience would count for something.
Recent funding cuts have stripped that assumption away. With a young family and no certainty ahead, he now stands at a crossroads. He may have to uproot his family again, this time not for a mission but for survival. He may have to step down into a role far below his experience, or leave the sector entirely, knowing that even with savings, time is limited in a city like Geneva. The programmes he built, the years he gave, and the institutional memory he carries will quietly disappear, unremarked.
Sitting across from him, it became impossible to talk about the humanitarian crisis unfolding around the world as something abstract. It was no longer only about budgets, policy shifts, or donor priorities. It was about the slow unravelling of a system that has depended on people like him for decades, and is now shedding them without ceremony.
"This is where my reflection begins."
In a clinic in Nigeria, a mother holds her malnourished child. Humanitarian action exists to save lives, ease suffering and protect dignity. When funding is cut, this is the work that disappears, and this is where the cost is carried. Photo: Sebastian Rich
Humanitarian action was never meant to solve displacement. It does not end wars, undo political failure, or resolve the forces that drive people from their homes. Its purpose is narrower and more fragile than that. It exists to save lives, alleviate suffering, protect dignity, and maintain a moral line in places where systems have failed. It is the work of staying human when the world becomes unmanageable.
This is not a transition driven by innovation or progress. Humanitarian workers are not being displaced in the way film cameras were replaced by digital technology, where an old tool gave way to a better one. There is no new system stepping in to meet the needs that remain. The challenge of displacement endures. It has grown. More people are fleeing conflict, disaster, and climate stress than at any point in modern history. What is disappearing is not the problem, but the collective willingness to respond to it.
This is not to claim that humanitarian responses were ever perfect. They were not, and this matters. There was inefficiency, duplication, and at times an inward-looking culture that deserved scrutiny. But there is only so much cutting of fat before you begin cutting into muscle. What is happening now goes far beyond reform or rationalisation. The system is being hollowed out while the demands placed upon it continue to rise. At that point, what disappears is not inefficiency but the ability to respond at all.
Humanitarianism is facing one of the most severe ruptures in its modern history. Across 2024 and accelerating through 2025, thousands of humanitarian workers have been laid off, programmes have closed mid-response, and organisations that once defined global emergency action are retreating, merging, or quietly disappearing. Aid budgets have been slashed by the United States, the United Kingdom, and many European governments, while private-sector funding has followed the same downward trajectory. What was once framed as a shared global commitment to easing suffering has fractured into domestic politics, short-term interests, and strategic withdrawal.
"The humanitarian space to work, to protect, and to respond is shrinking in full view of the world."
Humanitarian action exists to save lives and protect dignity, not to solve the causes of suffering, but to prevent its total moral collapse. Yet it now operates in a world where crises are no longer brief interruptions but permanent conditions. More than 110 million people are now forcibly displaced worldwide. This figure has more than doubled in just over a decade. Conflicts last longer. Disasters strike more often. Climate shocks compound existing fragility. Yet the systems meant to respond are being steadily dismantled.
In moments like this, it is tempting for humanitarians to dig in defensively. To insist that governments simply do not understand the truth of displacement and suffering. To frame the crisis as a funding gap that can be corrected with better advocacy or sharper messaging. There is truth in that frustration, but it is incomplete. The collapse of humanitarian funding in 2025 is not merely a funding shortfall. It reflects a deeper loss of political will and global attention, and a system built to chase that attention rather than withstand its absence.
Northern Afghanistan, 2018–19. Drought and conflict forced families from their homes toward Badghis and onward to Herat, where many waited for assistance under tarpaulins and in improvised shelters. When crises overlap, suffering deepens and responses strain. Photo: Tom Corcoran
Afghanistan offers one of the clearest and most uncomfortable illustrations of this reality. For two decades, enormous sums were poured into humanitarian and development programmes alongside military intervention. Aid budgets expanded dramatically, parallel systems were built, and international UN agencies and NGOs came to dominate service delivery. What emerged was a foreign bubble shaped by institutional incentives. International staff rotated through fortified compounds, earned allowances linked to risk and hardship, built careers, and accumulated experience that translated into authority within the system. Many did serious and committed work. The failure was not personal. It was structural.
Outside a small number of urban centres, access remained limited and uneven. Insecurity persisted. Entire regions saw little sustained engagement. After twenty years, the evidence was undeniable. Poverty remained widespread. The economy was fragile and deeply aid-dependent. Conflict continued. Basic services collapsed the moment external funding wavered. Afghan organisations were rarely positioned as long-term leaders. They were implementers and subcontractors on programmes whose strategic decisions were made elsewhere. When political priorities shifted and foreign troops withdrew, funding collapsed almost overnight. Programmes that communities had come to rely on vanished. Afghan institutions were left exposed, underfunded, and constrained, expected to carry the consequences of a system that had never truly invested in their autonomy or durability.
Today, Afghanistan remains one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises, yet it receives only a fraction of the resources once available. The suffering did not suddenly appear when aid declined. It was always there. What disappeared was geopolitical interest and the willingness to stay once Afghanistan no longer served foreign agendas.
Lebanon laid bare the same structural logic in a compressed, highly visible form after the Beirut Port Blast. Many international agencies were not present in Beirut when the explosion occurred. Some had minimal footprints. Others were absent entirely. Yet within weeks, international organisations rushed to establish offices, expand capacity, and position themselves as lead responders. Lebanese civil society organisations were already responding, drawing on deep local networks and intimate knowledge of affected neighbourhoods. Many were sidelined as the international response scaled up.
A two-tiered humanitarian system quickly emerged. One-tier international, well-funded, highly visible, and accountable upward to donors and reporting to OCHA. The other local, underfunded, overstretched, and accountable directly to communities. In an Arabic and French-speaking country with a highly educated civil society, English became the dominant language of humanitarian coordination. Funding calls, coordination meetings, reporting templates, and strategic discussions were conducted in English, creating barriers to participation that were rarely acknowledged. Language became power, framed as efficiency.
Donors justified this architecture on the grounds of risk management. Funding barriers were erected in the name of avoiding local corruption, even though corruption in Lebanon was structural and political, not rooted in community organisations. Paperwork and compliance requirements multiplied. Short funding cycles limited planning. International agencies absorbed the majority of resources through overheads, salaries, and parallel systems. Trust flowed upward and outward, but rarely inward. As funding declined, international agencies scaled back or withdrew. Lebanese organisations remained, weakened and under-resourced, left to manage the long tail of crisis.
Beirut, Lebanon, August 2020. The port blast killed more than 200 people, injured over 7,000, and left an estimated 300,000 without homes. Local organisations responded first, rooted in neighbourhoods and families, while international agencies operated through parallel systems. The disaster exposed the politics of modern humanitarian response.
The Rohingya crisis follows yet another familiar pattern. In 2017 and 2018, images of mass flight from Myanmar briefly dominated global headlines. By 2018, approximately 690,000 Rohingya had fled to Bangladesh. Funding surged. Camps expanded rapidly. One of the largest humanitarian responses in the world was mobilised almost overnight. The crisis was framed as acute and temporary. It never ended. Today, just over 1.1 million Rohingya are formally registered as refugees in Bangladesh, with broader estimates including births and unregistered arrivals placing the figure closer to 1.3 million. In less than a decade, the displaced population has grown by roughly half a million people. The camps remain, expanding and densifying, while global attention fades in and out of the news cycle. Living conditions fall far short of minimum standards for dignity.
"Humanitarianism manages the crisis, but it does not resolve it. Displacement is normalised, as if the response itself were somehow enough."
These are not isolated failures. Afghanistan, Lebanon, and the Rohingya crisis reveal a broader humanitarian pattern repeated across protracted emergencies. Syria, Yemen, South Sudan, Haiti. A system built around short funding cycles responding to long-term suffering. Knowledge accumulates, but rarely transfers in ways that build durable local capacity. Careers advance. Institutions grow. Displacement hardens into permanence. Camps become cities. Temporary solutions become indefinite waiting. None of this should be read as a dismissal of humanitarian workers themselves. On the contrary, they are often the system’s greatest cost and its quiet conscience.
Thousands have sacrificed personal safety, family stability, and any predictable sense of home to deliver aid under impossible conditions. Many have worked through burnout and moral injury, returning year after year to crises that have grown rather than been resolved. They did not do this for wealth or recognition, but because they believed that presence mattered.
I write this as someone who has been part of that workforce for many years. Like countless others, I have lived with the frustration of working within systems that rarely align with field realities, where politics, funding cycles, and institutional caution blunt what could be achieved. Yet alongside that, frustration has always been a commitment to act. To find ways around obstacles. To deliver shelter, protection, or dignity where possible, even when it was not enough.
The imbalance becomes stark when set against global spending priorities. Global military and defence spending now exceeds two trillion dollars a year. By comparison, the United Nations' 2026 humanitarian appeal totals approximately $33 billion, with priority funding of approximately $23 billion to support 87 million people facing an acute crisis.
Humanitarian needs account for approximately 1.5% of global spending on war preparation. This is not a question of affordability. It is a question of priorities.
Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. What began as an emergency is now home to more than one million Rohingya. As numbers grow and density increases, humanitarian systems manage vast, makeshift cities on shrinking budgets. These camps are not a solution. They are the human cost of unresolved political failure.
If humanitarianism is to remain credible, the question is not only how much money is available, but who controls it and to what end. Humanitarian actors in the field must have far greater authority to decide how funds are used, based on needs as they are experienced, not as they are framed by donor politics, strategic interests, or global agendas set far from the crisis itself. The current system places humanitarians in the position of implementers rather than decision makers, constantly adjusting responses to satisfy funding conditions rather than human reality. This is not accountability. It is a distortion.
Local capacity must be central to any future model, but it must be approached honestly. This cannot be a narrative of international actors arriving to rescue local communities, nor a convenient shifting of responsibility onto the poorest countries in the world. The scale of humanitarian need today demands that annual response funding be treated as a given, not as something to beg for year after year. The resources required to meet basic humanitarian needs are modest when set against global spending priorities. Their availability should not depend on political cycles, media attention, or donor fatigue.
At the same time, humanitarian institutions must take responsibility for their own expansion. Over the years, layers of senior positions, coordination structures, thematic specialists, and parallel strategies have multiplied, often with only an indirect connection to reducing suffering on the ground. Mandates blur. Agencies mirror one another. Emergency organisations establish new sectors even where expertise already exists elsewhere. Senior staff are sent to global summits while field teams shrink. In the competition for relevance and funding, purpose becomes diluted.
Humanitarianism does not need more sectors, more strategies, or more conferences. It needs clarity and restraint. It needs leaders willing to reduce internal bloat, resist mandate creep, and measure success not by budgets managed or positions created, but by suffering genuinely reduced. Above all, it needs the courage to return power to where it belongs, with those closest to the crisis, accountable first to affected communities rather than to political convenience.
As for my friend, he will be all right. People shaped by years of humanitarian work usually are. Not because the path is easy, but because they have learned to adapt, to read complexity, and to work with others rather than against them. Whatever comes next for him will not erase what he has already done, or the values that shaped how he did it.
The more difficult question is not what happens to him, or to others like him. It is what happens to a humanitarian system that can afford to lose the team players, the people shaped by experience, humility, and long memory, while the crises they spent their lives responding to continue to expand. Individuals will adapt. Families will move on. The suffering of millions displaced will not.
That is the moment we are in now. Not the end of humanitarianism, but a test of whether it can remember its purpose, shed what distracts it, and continue the quiet, necessary work of staying human.