Humanitarianism has long been in crisis, but since early 2025 the sector has been experiencing an unprecedented organizational, institutional, normative, and political collapse.
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As scholars active in the broad, inter-, and multidisciplinary field of humanitarian studies, we must try to understand and analyze the impact of this collapse and address the important institutional challenges it obliges us to grapple with.
This spring, I have the privilege of being on sabbatical from my University professorship. My main project is to draft the book Regulating Humanitarianism and submit a complete manuscript to the publisher. Things have not turned out quite that way. Over the past couple of weeks, it has seemed like the aid sector is not so much going through a process of de-regulating as uncertain and undetermined processes of de-regularizing, de-flating, de-composing, and many other things beginning with ‘de.’ In trying to regain my lost plot I have been speaking to fellow academics, activists, NGO workers, UN staff, and humanitarian leaders across the sector to learn how they see the causes and consequences of what is currently unfolding.
This has led me to think that we as a scholarly community also have some collective work to do. This blog is an invitation to engage.
When thinking about the question ‘What now for humanitarian studies,’ I begin by articulating my concerns about three orders of harm.
The first order of concern is about the direct harms arising from this collapse and the impact on communities and individuals in crisis. This ranges from the cutting of food rations and medical treatment to the closure of educational opportunities, the chilling effect on the eradication of diversity initiatives and gender-based programming, and the folding of refugee resettlement programs to name but a few. As pertinently noted, because the constituencies hardest hit are not powerful, the effects may be wide-ranging but not highly visible. It is our job to identify, map, and understand these effects.
The second order of concern refers to what happens to the aid industry. From the debate in the sector – where many reiterate strong criticism over the sector’s continued failure to reform and decolonize, express frustration over how the meltdown is being handled, and the resistance among some actors (particularly the upper echelons of the humanitarian UN) to take on board the implications of current events – it seems clear that while the most important challenges for humanitarians pre-2025 and in 2025 remain the same, something fundamental has changed. The post-Cold War humanitarian moment has been over for a long time. Now it appears that the post-World War humanitarian order has ended. If this suggestion turns out to be correct, the implications are enormous. Again, figuring this out is clearly part of our job description. A raft of issues calls for our attention: what are the normative and logistical aspects of abrupt project and organizational closures? What is the predicament of abandoned, neglected, or compromised digital infrastructure? Between the reform-is-possible camp and the burn-it-all-down/good-riddance-finally crowd, what ideas are emerging about the future of aid?
The third order of concern pertains to us – the relatively small scholarly community involved in humanitarian studies and our fitness for purpose (which is knowledge production). Figuring out the dilemmas here and what is at stake is our job – and only our job. My hypotheses for the medium-to-the-long term future are the following:
- With fewer jobs in the aid sector, there will be less need for formal qualifications. This means that for education – mainly revolving around master programs – the prospects are potentially bleak. A comparative and detailed conversation about budgets, institutional strategies, student enrollments, and labor market relevance is required to give us a fuller picture of the medium-to-long term of master programs. I would suggest that a collaborative conversation is also needed for thinking about building and maintaining political constituencies for emergency management and humanitarian response education.
- Funding for research on humanitarian crises has never been lavish, but such funding has been available in the last fifteen years, contributing to a radical increase in the PhDs and postdocs doing their academic work in the humanitarian studies field. While the heyday of humanitarian studies project-making has been over for a while, funding availability will continue to decrease: Not only due to the active sidelining of the concerns and approaches of the humanitarian sector but also due to attention being focused elsewhere (Procurement. Of. Military. Equipment). This means less of everything.
- With fewer projects and more limited institutional structures – and a shrunken academic community – there will also be less research output. In some ways, this is not necessarily an exclusively negative development. Like most other fields, overproduction has become endemic in humanitarian studies.
While these tiers of harm cover a vast political, cultural, and legal landscape, they all point to the same question:
Who will we be when all of this has come to pass? Will we be (useful/relevant/contributing to) anything at all?
Yet, for the short term, another problem is more acute, academically and practically speaking. On the bright side, this is also an issue which we have some kind of collective control over. Over the past weeks, one thing has surely been business as usual: I have had to review and evaluate! Some of the things I have been reading have been great, others unfinished, and some not really worth publishing. This is normal. What feels less normal is the distinct sense that even where academic excellence has been on display, the work is partly or wholly outdated. This is work that speaks to the world of yesterday and a sector that to a considerable extent looks different with different structural problems and different explanations for these problems and what one can do about them.
For us as a field, we need to think carefully about how we manage our publication pipeline over the next year. If we do not think strategically about the pipeline issue, I fear we risk (even greater) academic and policy irrelevance.
For us as a scholarly community, not only maintaining relevance but doubling down on societal relevance is crucial for continued viability.
To start a conversation about concrete scenarios, I have formulated three quite different approaches to this dilemma.
- One possibility is to adopt the stance that for quality academic work, the dangers of real-time diagnostics and presentism are as grave as the threat of topical outdatedness. According to this approach, we should hold our ground, maintain high academic standards, and insist on scholarly rigor but otherwise keep calm and carry on. There is also a normative aspect: many early career scholars have worked hard on articles, chapters, and books that they can ill afford to have dismissed as ‘largely meaningless,’ so this lens should not be applied to peer review and acceptance policies.
- Yet, no matter how good the quality of the publication is, we cannot end up in a situation where the most important humanitarian studies journals are stacked with pre-2025 discussions. According to this perspective, developing mitigation strategies is feasible and it’s timely to do that now. As a small topical field, we are facing a Cold War moment (imagine the morning of the Soviet scholar specialist as she gets herself a cup of tea and then realizes that the Soviet Union has stopped existing). Yet, many of the scholars in Cold War studies adapted by studying emerging topics (democracy), turning to historical archival research, or specializing in studying new actors (countries that had been part of the Soviet empire). To use some of the same language, instead of focusing on the reformist potential of the sector, we need to understand something about the political collapse of the sector as well as the logistical, political, and legal details of the unraveling. Authors should be supported in their efforts to pivot their work toward an analysis of change – but major revisions should also be the default response of scientific journals.
- Time is scarce. The third approach is blunt but implementable without care and consideration: everything that smacks of being outdated is unceremoniously rejected with that explanation.
To sum it all up: This blog asks, ‘What now for humanitarian studies?.’ My short answer is that something fundamental is changing also for us. Third-order concerns about knowledge production are valid concerns.
Let’s talk about it.
I am grateful to Maria Gabrielsen Jumbert, Olaf Corry, Michael Barnett, Antonio De Lauri, Larissa Fast, Kristoffer Lidén, Stuart Ocampo, Giulio Coppi, Aaron Martin, and many others for engaging in conversations about the collapse of the aid sector and the future of humanitarian studies.
- Kristin Bergtora Sandvik is a Research Professor in Humanitarian Studies at PRIO and a Professor of Criminology and Sociology of Law at the University of Oslo.