2026:Why We Are All Humanitarians Now

We entered 2026 in a world that no longer pretends to be governed by rules. The trends identified by The New Humanitarian are not distant warning signs. They are already shaping our everyday lives.

After a year marked by wars in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine, by the erosion of International Humanitarian Law, and by the casual normalisation of force over law, the new year opened with something unmistakable: a global order drifting from instability into open lawlessness. Territorial conquest returned to political vocabulary. Deal-making replaced peace-making. Autocracy stopped being a warning and became an aspiration.

These are not distant geopolitical shifts. They are structural changes that are beginning to reconfigure Western privilege itself.

For decades, many of us in Europe lived with an unspoken assumption: that crisis was elsewhere. That instability, authoritarianism, displacement, and climate collapse were realities to be studied, funded, managed, or narrated—but not fundamentally lived. The humanitarian world existed “out there,” and Europe existed as a protected inside.

That distinction no longer holds.

Territorial conquest being back on the table does not only concern borders far away. It marks the end of the post–Cold War illusion that Europe is permanently insulated. Security becomes conditional, defence budgets expand while welfare contracts, and fear becomes a governing tool.

Autocracy follows the same logic. Authoritarian governance is no longer framed as democratic failure, but as efficiency. In Europe, this translates into shrinking civic space, normalised surveillance, and generations growing up with fewer democratic expectations than those before them.

Migration policy reveals this hierarchy with particular clarity. Europe continues to depend on mobility—of capital, goods, energy—but criminalises the movement of people. Solidarity becomes suspect. Asylum becomes securitised.

Climate breakdown accelerates this reckoning. Overshooting 1.5°C does not abolish privilege, but redistributes vulnerability downward and forward in time. Heatwaves, floods, fires, food insecurity, and collapsing insurance systems now reach Europe directly, but unevenly.

Crisis is no longer externalised—it is internalised, classed, and generational.

At the same time, gender and LGBTQ+ rights—once assumed irreversible—are openly rolled back. Equality is reframed as ideology. Protection as excess. For many younger people, this is the first time progress feels reversible.

Overlay all of this with expanding militarisation and shrinking solidarity. There is always money for weapons, borders, and surveillance—never enough for care, education, culture, or prevention. Violence becomes normalised. Care becomes invisible labour. Peace becomes something to manage, not to build.

Beneath it all, capitalism tightens its extractive grip. Precarity spreads through universities, NGOs, creative industries, research, and so-called vocational sectors. Being educated, multilingual, and mobile no longer guarantees stability.

This is where the humanitarian narrative collapses into lived reality.

For people like me—unemployed for over a year, not by lack of competence but by structural displacement—staying informed becomes labour. Unpaid. Unrecognised. Often invisible. Informing is no longer “sexy.” It does not trend, scale easily, or pay rent.

Yet abandoning knowledge is not an option. Because ignorance is exactly what autocracy feeds on. Confusion, exhaustion, and fragmentation are not side effects; they are conditions of governance.

What is framed as geopolitics is lived as hunger, displacement, fear, surveillance, disease, and erasure. What is justified as economic necessity is extraction from bodies, territories, and futures.

Which means: we are all implicated. And therefore, we are all humanitarians now.

This moment cannot be navigated alone, or within generational silos.

Older generations carry memory—of fascism, war, reconstruction, collective struggle. Younger generations carry urgency—climate grief, economic precarity, and the sense that the future is being foreclosed.

This is why generations must speak to each other—now. Together, generations can transform fear into strategy and memory into resistance. This is not about nostalgia or blame. It is about continuity.

Faced with this landscape, the response cannot remain institutional, technocratic, or purely academic. Longer jargon will not save us. Expertise without translation will not mobilise anyone.

That is why I chose to channel this work into daily practices: reading and writing, art and culture, outdoor and embodied learning, holistic spaces that counter burnout, and engagement with the private sector—not to legitimise it, but to interrupt it.

If capitalism extracts everywhere, culture must circulate everywhere. In schools and universities. In cinemas and libraries. In squares, kitchens, workplaces, and on every table where people still gather.

We need to bring back history and memory, not as nostalgia but as orientation. We need to translate global trends into languages people understand, without reproducing the psychopathology of autocracy. We need to educate without mystifying, resist without dehumanising, and organise without waiting for permission.

Western privilege is not ending—but it is being restructured into something narrower, harsher, and conditional. That is precisely why this moment demands collective, intergenerational, and everyday resistance.

Not later.Not when it is safer. Now.

Z. Liew