Washington D.C, December 16, 2025 —  As we close out the first quarter of the 21st century, a humanitarian organization like the IRC is confronted by a series of contradictions. The world can feed 9 billion people, yet 43 million children are malnourished. It has never been easier to travel, yet 120 million refugees and displaced people cannot go home. Poverty has been slashed over thirty years, but inequalities are growing fast, and the biggest inequality of all is between people born in stable states and those born in the growing number of conflict states.  Clean energy has never been cheaper, yet the poorest countries are falling behind on every measure of mitigation and adaptation to climate change.

The analysis presented in our 2026 Emergency Watchlist is that we are living through a New World Disorder. The map of poverty has been redrawn around conflict, just as the map of geopolitics has been scrambled by shifts in economic and political power. Civil wars that once had two sides now have more than ten. And the red lines that once protected children, hospitals, and aid workers are being erased. 

The purpose of these remarks is to provide a brief summary of the argument in the Watchlist, but I hope you read the full document. 

The starting point is the number of people in humanitarian need.  Those of you who follow this data will notice that the figure of 239 million people in humanitarian need is 70 million below last year’s figure.  I wish that was because needs had abated or been addressed.  Sadly that is not the case.

The difference is in the method of counting not the amount of suffering. Funding constraints have led the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs to narrow the scope of their assessment. The fact that they now report on only the people under the most severe needs is itself a manifestation of the New World Disorder. We are losing visibility on tens of millions of people whose conditions have not improved, but for whom there will not be enough resources to even attempt to meet their needs.

The 20 countries featured on this year’s Watchlist exemplify these trends. Based on our unique analysis of 74 quantitative and qualitiative indicators, the countries featured represent just 12 per cent of the global population, but account for 89 per cent of those in humanitarian need, four in every five displaced people, and 96 per cent of the 617 aid workers killed, kidnapped, or wounded this year.

The most alarming fact of all is that as the world has become more connected, empathy has become more divided, and as needs have grown, support for grant aid has been withdrawn.  This is ultimately what needs to be understood, confronted and reversed.

Surging Crisis, Collapsing Support

The countries of the Watchlist challenge all of us.

Last week I was in Somalia. The country suffers from conflict, drought, corruption, while the people show resilience, ingenuity and entrepreneurship.  Six million people are in humanitarian need.  Four million are at high levels of food insecurity.  Famine struck in 2011 and was staved off in 2018 and  2021/2.  Now it is threatening again.  Yet the aid appeal is 28 per cent funded. 

In September, I was in Sudan, top of the Watchlist for the third year in a row, the biggest humanitarian crisis today and the biggest ever recorded.  Over 30 million people are in humanitarian need, 20 million facing crisis levels of food insecurity, 12 million displaced. Yet even this aid effort to help even the very worst-off is only 35 per cent funded. 

Globally, the figures on humanitarian need are shaming:

Meanwhile, projected aid cuts in 2025 total over $30bn.  Global humanitarian funding has fallen by more than 50 per cent in the last year. Life-saving programs have not been spared.  

Headline crises like Ukraine are “lucky” to receive just under half of their assessed funding needs, while the Venezuela regional response gets a piddling 9 per cent. The OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) countries spend more of their “overseas aid funds” on hosting refugees at home than on humanitarian or health interventions abroad. The U.S., once responsible for 30 cents of every aid dollar, has led the way, cutting 83 per cent of its programs. 

The cuts are projected to cause 1.8 million excess deaths in 2025 alone, including 700,000 children.

In foreign policy circles, the erosion of the post World War Two international order is often discussed in the abstract.  In Watchlist countries, it is a lived reality.  The core argument of the Watchlist is simple: every humanitarian emergency is a political emergency.  That is the origin of this disorder.  

The Geopolitics of Disorder

The new world disorder is driven by shifts in political power, the break-up of long term alliances, and a new transactionalism that has usurped basic protections for people.  There are more rivals and more risks; shifting alliances; and power based deal-making in war zones, often led by external actors.  These trends are what fuel the most destructive tendencies that IRC teams see on the ground:

The New World Disorder speaks to something distinctive: that the old order has clearly disappeared, but a new order has not been created.  This needs to be called out, and its dangers recognized.

We do not view the past through rose-tinted spectacles.  We never declared a “golden age”.  The basic rights of people enunciated in the UN Charter and elsewhere after the Second World War were universal on paper rather than reality.  They were honored in breach as well as observance.   But the list of rights, above all to protection from harm, provided a global standard against which to judge actions of state and non-state actors.  When that is lacking, as it is now, impunity is given license.  And that is a threat to us all.

Solutions not just Suffering

The purpose of the Watchlist is not just to sound the alarm.  Its argument is that while the problems are real, the mitigations are not beyond reach.  The Watchlist addresses three questions and suggests how to answer them.  

First, how do we shift the balance from profit to protection in war zones? 

We argue that peace processes won’t work until they recognize how cross-border financial flows fuel conflict; that peace processes need to be inclusive of new and rising powers; that the evidence is clear that durable peace needs to be built from the bottom up as well as top down, with women and women-led organizations at the table; but also that the gridlock in the UN Security Council, with 49 vetoes in the last decade, requires support for the French/Mexican proposal that the veto should be suspended in cases of mass atrocity. 

Second, how do we shift the balance from danger to dignity for people caught up in crisis?

We argue all states should support and fully fund UN accountability mechanisms, such as Commissions of Inquiry and Fact-Finding Missions.  We argue that governments should firewall humanitarian access from political and military negotiations, in light of the massive constraints on humanitarian access in 36 countries in the last year.  We call out the extraordinary levels of gender based violence in conflict, and the appallingly low levels of support for survivors. We also argue that the rights of those seeking refuge are basic not grandiose, and should be prioritized in making migration management fair, fast and effective.

Third, how do we shift the balance from retreat to recommitment when it comes to the future of aid?

We argue that we are in a new era of aid, where there needs to be new focus, new partnerships, and new focus on cost effectiveness, underpinned by a drive for innovation to maximize the benefit of technological advancements for those in danger of being most left behind.  We think all are possible.  Fragile states need to be the focus of aid, because that is where most of the extreme poor are to be found.  Proven, cost effectiveness interventions - like IRC’s $2 a shot immunization drive - need to be scaled, because they are the fastest route to impact.  Aid needs to anticipate crisis, especially extreme climate events, because that has been shown to have outsize impact.

The New World Disorder is not only a description; it is a warning. And warnings are only useful if they prompt action. The Watchlist shows where risk is greatest, but also where resolve can still make a difference. The forces pulling the world apart are strong, but they are not inexorable. Protection can be rebuilt. Dignity can be restored. Commitment can be renewed. The task is to match the courage of those living through crisis with leadership worthy of their resilience—and to prove that even in an age of disorder, humanity still has choices, and those choices still matter.