When the Center Cannot Hold

Something is collapsing. Not just institutions or budgets — but belief.

The scaffolding that once held the idea of humanitarianism is cracking, and through the gaps, we can see the truth: aid, in its current form, is not saving lives. It is managing death.

Capacity has disappeared. Across the world, three hundred and sixty-nine thousand people will die of malnutrition this year — not because food doesn’t exist, but because justice doesn’t. Six million children are out of school, growing up in the shadow of a system that has chosen profit over people. A million more are cut off from HIV treatment, their bodies made collateral in the arithmetic of austerity.

And still, the question whispered across offices, conference halls, and dusty tents remains painfully small: What do we do with less?

We do less.

We become less.

We watch as aid becomes weaponised — as humanitarian workers are murdered, as neutrality becomes a performance rather than a principle.

This is not just a humanitarian crisis. It is a crisis of values. Of leadership. Of imagination.

Because the truth is, the state is no longer failing — it is fostering the failure.

As governments turn their gaze away, the humanitarian sector scrambles toward philanthropy and corporate partnerships, mistaking sponsorship for solidarity. But that path leads nowhere new. It is paved with the same old logic: control dressed up as compassion.

When we think of “giving,” we think of money — and when money arrives, power follows close behind. Charity becomes a market. Neo-liberalism remains a form of violence.

How can aid be neutral when empire funds it?

How can justice bloom from a system that was never meant to be just?

Those on the frontlines of famine, war, and genocide are not asking for more charity. They are asking that we stop being the architects of their suffering. That we stop exploiting their pain for our redemption.

And as we debate frameworks and reform, the world outside the aid bubble has already begun to rearrange itself.

Power no longer flows from a single center; it fractures into blocs — “a world divided into regional economic and technological empires.” The U.S., China, Europe, India — each guards its own resources, each uses aid as an instrument of influence.

In this multipolar reality, “aid becomes a core instrument of geopolitical competition.” 

The UN fades into irrelevance. Neutrality becomes an antique ideal. What is called “humanitarian” becomes strategic — and what is strategic becomes humanitarian.

This is the age of Empires of Aid. Money travels the same routes as power. What once claimed to serve humanity now serves foreign policy.

Yet in the cracks of empire, something else stirs — a quieter resistance, a different imagination. “New alliances and new forms of aid emerge,” built not by donors or diplomats but by communities themselves: “faith-based networks, regional cooperation, local actors, transnational collectives.”

This is the rise of networked solidarities — fluid, rooted, and ungovernable.

In Sudan, as the state collapses and bombs fall, people are still building. Doctors, students, mothers — unregistered, unrecognised — create networks of care, resistance committees, mobile clinics, kitchens. They move through military zones like veins through a wounded body, carrying blood and breath to where it’s needed most.

This is not charity. It is solidarity. It is what life looks like when systems fail.

The people of Sudan are not waiting for the world to save them. They are saving themselves.

And across Latin America, Afro-descendant, Indigenous, and feminist movements are reimagining cooperation — not rejecting the system but reinventing it. Decolonisation here is not a slogan, but a daily act: redistributing authorship, regenerating relationships, and challenging the geography of power that keeps decisions in the Global North and consequences in the South.

Solidarity, once a beautiful word, became colonial the moment it was owned by those who gave rather than shared.

This is what some call “Aid on many paths” — a world where diverse regional alliances take shape, where aid aligns with cultural and political contexts, and where local actors lead while intermediary organisations provide financing and advocacy. In this world, the center of gravity shifts — not to the North or South, but to the relationships between them.

But there is also another vision — “Patchwork Solidarities.” In this world, global coordination frays, yet people create their own safety nets: “do-it-yourself solidarity, self-help networks, diaspora giving, mutual aid.” These responses are agile, improvised, and deeply human. There is no central command — only constellations of care.

And then, beyond the horizon, there is the darker future still — “The Great Unravelling.”

A world of chaos and closed borders, where states turn inward and aid declines sharply. “Massive displacement leads to ungoverned spaces,” and only local actors remain — unpaid, unprotected, yet still showing up.

We do not have to imagine this world. We are already glimpsing it. From Gaza to Haiti to Sudan, humanitarian corridors narrow to choke points; the politics of indifference become policy itself.

These are not prophecies. They are mirrors. Futures already here, unevenly distributed.

If there is any agency left, it lies in the choice to reimagine.

To reclaim legitimacy and accountability, unlearning the Western bias that defines success by control.

To develop funding streams that trust local leadership and anticipatory action.

To build strategic alliances across the system that can resist reactionary politics.To turn aid from a currency of control into a commons of care.

Because aid cannot remain neutral in a world on fire.Because the same hands that drop bombs cannot write the rules of compassion.Because the ledger of morality cannot continue to balance on the bodies of the poor.

The world spends 2.7 trillion dollars on militaries — thirteen times more than on development aid. That number alone tells the story. The same governments that sell weapons to regimes declare humanitarian emergencies in their aftermath.

So yes, this is a crisis. But not just of aid — of humanity itself.

We must dismantle what is unjust, even when it makes us uncomfortable.

We must resist the seduction of throwing crumbs and calling it compassion.

We must build, slowly and painfully, something that looks less like charity and more like justice.

Because the pain in Sudan is mine.

Because the grief in Myanmar is ours.

Because the future, if it is to exist, must be reimagined — not managed.

This is not an academic question anymore.

It’s personal now.

Z.Liew