Over recent years, in Yemen, aid agencies have depended on funding from governments directly and indirectly responsible for the bombing of the country. In Ukraine, Western governments have defined their aid as contributing to NATO strategy, while denouncing Russian war crimes. In Gaza, they have continued to participate in an extreme and brutal exercise in collective punishment, even after the International Court of Justice accepted the plausibility of an accusation of genocide made against the Israeli government. Meanwhile, climate-related disasters receive comparatively little attention, adding to a growing global population that is surplus to the requirements of production. The opportunistic deployment of humanitarian rhetoric by the Russian government, while it deploys mercenaries in Syria, Sudan, and elsewhere, only further highlights these contradictions, which the United States seems unwilling or unable to obscure as its hegemony is tested.

So what does this mean for humanitarianism? Is this just another moment of temporary decline leading to reinvention? Or is the crisis of humanitarianism now terminal?