A troubling dynamic seems to be shaping global politics. Humanitarian crises are surging, even as the support systems and international cooperation required to address them are failing. You can see this amid the ongoing calamity of the war in Sudan, site of the one of the largest humanitarian disasters in modern history, where 30 million people are in need of assistance and 20 million face crisis levels of food insecurity. Efforts by the U.N. Security Council and a host of foreign powers have failed to force an end to the conflict, while a major shortfall in resources for aid agencies has had deadly consequences for some Sudanese.
Sudan tops the 2026 iteration of the Emergency Watchlist put out by the International Rescue Committee, a prominent humanitarian organization. The 20 countries on the watch list, which also include the conflict-stricken Palestinian territories, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Haiti, Myanmar and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, comprise 12 percent of the world’s population, but about 89 percent of the almost 300 million people around the world in need of humanitarian assistance.
The IRC report, published Tuesday, has become a depressingly accurate annual barometer of the world’s most troubling humanitarian crises. I spoke to former British politician David Miliband, now president and CEO of the IRC, about the report’s 2026 theme — “The New World Disorder” — and what the failures of the status quo tell us about the shape of global politics.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
So what is this “New World Disorder”?
The “New World Disorder” is a description of what’s happening in the world’s conflict zones, where 230 million people are left dependent on humanitarian need. The New World Disorder is the abuse of international humanitarian law in war. The New World Disorder is the internationalization of civil wars, so that they’re no longer internal conflicts between two sides, but multisided, internationalized power plays. The New World Disorder is the growing importance of profit over protection in the world’s conflict zones. And the New World Disorder is a framing of how geopolitics is impacting the lives of the most vulnerable people in the world who are civilians caught up in conflict.
And what about it is clearly “new”?
I think that we’ve passed a tipping point from the old order. We can no longer say that the rules-based order is the defining anchor of the global system and that there are some problems in its implementation. We now have a base case of disorder, a base case where it’s unusual for rules to be followed rather than not followed. And I think it’s far from clear that we’re going to move into a new order. It’s far from clear to me that we’re moving to a world of spheres of influence. I don’t think that if you’re Japanese, you’re going to be acceding to a Chinese sphere of influence. If you’re European, you’re not going to be acceding to a Russian sphere of influence. And if you’re Latin American, if you’re Brazilian, you’re not going to be acceding to an American sphere of influence.
Equally, it’s not clear that somehow regional bodies like the E.U. are going to become defining. I think we are more likely to be living in this more chaotic “might makes right” form of globalization, which is not the reverse of globalization. It’s a more anarchic form of globalization without rules.
A couple of years ago, you talked about a growing “age of impunity” and the erosion of systems of accountability. Things aren’t getting much better, are they?
Well, I think the age of impunity is more with us than ever, because of the flouting of legal rights for the protection of civilians, the flouting of the legal right to receive aid, the flouting of the laws of war, the bombing of hospitals and health facilities, the killing of aid workers. Fifty thousand civilians have died in conflict this year.
There’s all sorts of arguments about the weakening of checks and balances on the use of power in democratic countries, but the most acute examples of impunity are obviously the women who come out of [the Sudanese city of] El Fashir and say that they and every sister they know has been raped. That’s the age of impunity, writ large. What I think we have to address is that the world, in some ways, is more connected than ever before, but empathy is more divided than ever before. The world is more connected, because in the end, the truth does come out, but the “tribalization of pain” seems to have been dividing empathy.
Why does Sudan seem like such a hopeless situation?
I think the people who are profiting from the war care more than the rest of us who want to see it over, and the people who are profiting from the war have obviously more power than the victims of the war, because this didn’t start as a mass conflict between different Sudanese communities. It started as an elite struggle among soldiers. Civilians can’t stop the war. That imbalance is very fundamental to the fact that it’s worse than Darfur in the 2000s, yet the response is far less.
It also seems like the international system — the U.N. and so on — is unable to reckon with the situation effectively.
It’s a symptom of structural problems. That’s why Sudan is the avatar for the New World Disorder. Obviously, the situation in Sudan is extreme, and we’re not saying that that’s coming to every community in the world tomorrow, but it’s what happens when you don’t have rules, and when you don’t have guardrails, and when you don’t have laws and when you don’t have a rules-based order, because the loss of order is the consequence of the weakening of the constraints that were undoubtedly put on the best examples of the post-1945 settlement.
What’s the impact of the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID on the humanitarian system? Aid agencies across the board seem strapped for funding.
We’ve got a “scissors effect” where you’ve got historically high numbers of people in need, and then a sudden cliff on the amount of aid — more or less the halving of humanitarian aid in the space of a year. My own organization has lost more or less $400 million; 2 million clients have lost access to services.
I think there are three parts to the story that are really important. One part is that less is getting done, and clients in need — be they Sudanese refugees in South Sudan or kids in Afghanistan not getting education — are the most significantly hit. Secondly, there’s a short-term form of transactionalism that I think is very significant. There have been 57 measles outbreaks in the last year, globally. The cuts that are being made to global health can’t be justified in the self interest of the donor countries. Thirdly, we’re quadrupling down on our innovation. We’ve got teams working on using AI to diagnose monkeypox in Africa. We’re doubling down on new ways of solving big problems in such a way that we can make the money go further.
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