It’s hard to prepare for the next crisis when you’re spending more to pay down debt than on social services. But that’s the position many countries are in as the global debt crisis deepens. Global public debt is at a record $97 trillion, according to UN figures. Public debt is growing twice as fast in developing countries, and economists expect debt defaults – where a government can’t pay what it owes – to rise in the coming year. At the same time, governments are losing half a trillion dollars in underpaid taxes, including aid-receiving countries facing humanitarian emergencies. Combined, this means governments are shortchanged out of income that could better support their citizens – while locked in to punishing debt that’s draining their economies.

Some 48 developing countries spend more on interest than they do on education or health, according to the UN’s trade and development arm, UNCTAD. That’s a quarter of the world’s countries, home to more than 40% of the global population. This fiscal crisis eats away at public services. Debt payments and spending cuts demanded by international lenders are “choking” countries, UNAIDS warned, leaving HIV services chronically underfunded. And countries facing the world’s worst food crises are spending nearly double the amount on debt payments than they do on health, researchers say. Women and girls are especially impacted as governments cut back with “austerity measures” and “fiscal consolidation” – often demanded as conditions for loans. For example, in the Maldives, which is teetering on the edge of debt distress, analysts say cuts to social protection programmes such as single mothers’ allowances and food and electricity subsidies would hurt women disproportionately. 

The ripples can be seen in street demonstrations and farmers’ protests from Global South to Global North. Rising costs and questionable governance may be the most visible grievances. But debt distress, global lending policies, and public spending cuts or raised taxes are folded into the dynamics behind protests from Kenya to Pakistan (which spend 25% and 40% of government revenue on interest payments, respectively, according to UN figures), or from Angola (20%) to Nigeria (30%), or from Tunisia (11%) to Sri Lanka (74%). And as the climate crisis spirals, the cycle of disaster and debt accumulation speeds up. Countries take on loans to build back from disasters; servicing debt drains the money needed to prepare for the next one – and deepens dependency on aid if they’re forced to rely on external help. 

Comprehensive settlements to end wars were common in past decades, but the post-Cold War peacemaking boom has been derailed by war-on-terror politics, the return of great power rivalries, and the rise of influential new powers. Diplomats today are more focused on securing ceasefires than lasting peace, but even those efforts are in a rut. Initiatives to end Sudan’s war have been disjointed: Both the belligerents and their external backers seem more committed to prolonging the country’s collapse. Israel has been sabotaging ceasefire talks with Hamas, ignoring diplomatic tough talk from allies (knowing US arms will keep flowing), and invading its neighbours with impunity. The UN-led peace process in Yemen is at a standstill, while political groups and militias are still vying for power in Libya despite reduced fighting following a 2020 ceasefire. Peacemaking efforts in other battlefields appear non-existent. In Myanmar, the junta is raining down bombs on civilians, while putschists in West Africa’s Sahel region are doubling down on military campaigns, even punishing locals who want to engage in grassroots talks. The increased number of conflicts that are ending through military victory (see the HTS offensive in Syria, Azerbaijan’s blitzkrieg in Nagorno-Karabakh, and the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan) may also convince some warmakers to keep on fighting.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and America’s unflinching support for Israel’s destruction of Gaza have delivered near-fatal blows to the rules-based international order that Western nations have trumpeted since World War II. The re-election of Trump, who is openly hostile to international treaties and institutions, may accelerate the disorder, while other Western democracies cling to the old rules with diminishing success. Senegal will soon become the sixth African state to expel French troops. Europe continues to circumvent its own sanctions by buying Russian oil from India.

Russia and China are stepping in where Western influence has waned. No longer a single global system, multilateralism has fractured into smaller groupings of states with competing backers, presenting new challenges (as well as some potential opportunities). With the expansion of the BRICS economic bloc, several US-aligned states may be able to resolve disputes without Western input, as shown by the China-brokered détente between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Any external efforts to project influence over Burkina Faso, Mali, or Niger will now come up against the Alliance of Sahel States, the mutual defence pact formed last July after all three exited the ECOWAS bloc, perceived to be aligned with former colonial master France.

The New Humanitarian was founded in 1995, in the wake of the Rwandan genocide, in the enduring hope that providing early warning and better information about crises might help prevent future atrocities. Thirty years on, it has become evident that knowing more about what is going on isn’t the only problem: The lack of accountability for those who violate international humanitarian law is more glaring than ever, and the threat of justice doesn’t appear to be playing the deterrent role many hoped it might. More people may be talking about the international courts than usual (largely due to Gaza, but also Sudan and Ukraine), but what difference, if any, does it all make? The International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes and crimes against humanity hasn’t stopped the military onslaught, nor the restrictions on aid that the ICC warrant draws upon. And just weeks after a second order from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that it take “immediate and effective measures” to enable aid into northern Gaza to avert “plausible” genocide, Israel killed dozens of Palestinians who were working with UN agencies to get food to starving Palestinians. In Sudan, nearly 15 years after the ICC first issued an arrest warrant for then-President Omar al-Bashir, the group that evolved out of his Janjaweed militia is accused of a rash of atrocities and is currently besieging the city of El Fasher. For the record, Russia is still bombing hospitals in Ukraine, and, until recently, Syria too.

We noted this time last year that “women and children, as always, will bear the brunt of the impacts” of humanitarian crises in 2024. To give just a few examples to drive home the point: gender-based violence in Sudan has increased by 100% since the civil war erupted in April 2023; documented cases of sexual violence in eastern Demoratic Republic of the Congo more than doubled in the first half of 2024; and service providers in Port-au-Prince have reported receiving an average of 40 rape victims a day in some areas of the Haitian capital as gangs deploy sexual abuse as a routine means of torture and control. As we head into 2025, the situation is especially bleak. Already scarce, programmes for women and girls are often among the first to be cut when aid agencies face difficult decisions due to funding shortfalls, as they do now. And new risks are also on the horizon: from recently passed laws on reproductive health in America to growing restrictions on the rights of women and girls to work and be educated in Afghanistan. Women’s rights and queer movements, especially in Africa, are also being targeted and attacked by record levels of investment from US far-right groups.

Latin America has been plagued by gang violence for decades, but record-high cocaine production, fast and unregulated urbanisation, and the global expansion of transnational organised crime – often with the complicity of corrupt authorities and institutions – have led to new surges of criminality across the region. Millions of people have been internally displaced or have migrated due to losing their sources of livelihood to extortion rackets, because they face constant threats, or to prevent their children from being recruited by gangs. Those who stay often live in permanent fear and suffer chronic abuse. The resulting humanitarian fallout – including food insecurity, lack of access to basic services, and soaring mental health issues, among others – continues to worsen, even as aid groups face growing access barriers (see the read more below). From Mexico to Haiti, from Venezuela to Ecuador, from Honduras to Colombia, those responding are struggling to adapt to urban settings where criminal and armed groups hold sway. In Haiti, MSF temporarily suspended operations after facilities and ambulances were attacked; in southern Mexico, cartel-related violence forced humanitarian organisations to withdraw from entire areas; while similar aid suspensions have been seen in Guayaquil in Ecuador, in San José in Costa Rica, and in San Pedro Sula in Honduras (to name just a few).

The horrors of World War II supposedly taught the international community a lesson: Countries around the world have a moral responsibility to provide protection to people fleeing persecution based on their identities or political beliefs. Over time, the definition of who was considered deserving of protection gradually expanded to include those escaping the more general dangers of war and various other forms violence. The extent to which the principle of providing refugees with protection has been adhered to has always been political. But the concept of asylum is currently under unprecedented assault, particularly in the Global North. For nearly a decade, centre and left-leaning political parties across Europe have adopted increasingly hardline policies and rhetoric on migration in an attempt to stave off the advance of the far-right at the ballot box. The situation is similar in the United States, where the Democratic Party of President Joe Biden talked tough and cracked down on migration at the US southern border ahead of the 2024 elections. In both cases, the strategy has failed – both for the political parties using it and, most importantly, for people forced to undertake exceedingly dangerous journeys in search of protection.