After USAID, humanitarianism ceded the field. That’s our cue.

THE BLOODSTAINS are visible from space.

- NOUBAR AFEYAN GUEST CONTRIBUTOR

In the last weeks, the Rapid Support Forces — one party in Sudan’s years long civil war— captured the desert city of el-Fasher after a 17-month siege. Since then, fighters have embarked on a campaign of horrors: lining up and executing civilians, systematically killing patients in the city’s last functioning hospital, raping women and girls and shooting those who tried to flee at the city walls. According to the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, the bloodstains soaked into el-Fasher’s sand are so large as to be visible via satellite. Thousands are estimated dead.

So far, this tragedy has largely gone unnoticed in the United States — and it's easy, if unsettling, to understand why. The violence is but one more strike in an overwhelming drumbeat of conflict and crisis unfolding around the globe.

Last year, the world saw more active conflicts than in any other year since the end of World War II. Global reports of political violence surged by 25%. More humanitarian aid workers were killed in 2024 than in any other year on record.

This all points to a dawning era of what we might call “inhumanitarianism.”