War, aid and the movement of people

War, aid cuts, and migration are treated as separate crises. They are not. This piece traces the system that connects them in light of the ongoing war in Iran – and the political choices driving instability across borders.

Joseph Kiprono’s field in Kenya and a parliamentary hearing room in Washington do not appear to have much in common. One is a two-acre plot of exhausted soil; the other, a stage for debates about budgets, efficiency and national interest. But this week, they are part of the same system. 

That system is not breaking down by accident. It is being reconfigured. The dominant story told about foreign aid cuts is a familiar one: fiscal constraint, domestic priorities, a necessary correction after years of excess. At the same time, wars are framed as discrete geopolitical events – regional conflicts with tragic but contained consequences. Migration, in turn, is discussed as a separate ‘crisis,’ a pressure on borders that must be managed. 

Taken individually, each argument has its own logic. Taken together, they make no sense at all. Because what we are watching is not three separate phenomena. It is a single chain. The war in Iran disrupts the Strait of Hormuz. Fertiliser shipments stall. Diesel prices rise. Humanitarian supply chains begin to fail. Clinics reduce services. Farmers plant less. Food prices increase. Households cut meals. Aid budgets, already reduced, stretch further and break. And then, eventually, people move. Not because they want to, but because the system that sustained them has been systematically dismantled. Not to mention those displaced in the regions where bombs are falling. 

This is what interdependence looks like in practice. It is a set of material connections that carry consequences across continents. A missile fired in one region alters the price of bread in another. These are not distant ripple effects. They are direct transmissions of instability through a tightly coupled global system. A budget decision in London or Washington determines whether a clinic in Somalia can keep its generators running. 

And yet, the political language used to describe these developments works hard to keep them conceptually separate. Aid is treated as discretionary. War is treated as necessary and strategic. Migration is treated as a problem. What disappears is the relationship between them. 

The current turn in foreign aid policy makes that relationship harder to ignore. The UK’s reduction in Official Development Assistance, while committed to before the start of the war in Iran, alongside similar moves elsewhere, is not simply a matter of doing less. It is a reorientation of what aid is for. Increasingly, it is being framed in explicitly transactional terms: aligned with national interest, tied to diplomatic support, conditioned on political behaviour. The suggestion that countries’ voting records should influence whether they receive aid is not an aberration. It is the logical endpoint of this shift. 

In this model, aid is no longer a tool for addressing need where it exists. It becomes an instrument for producing alignment where it is useful. In practice, this reintroduces a hierarchy in which access to resources is conditional on political compliance, and decision-making power remains concentrated in the same states that define the terms of that compliance. The consequences are immediate. Bilateral support to parts of Africa is cut sharply. Safeguarding budgets – precisely the kind of funding that maintains trust and accountability – is reduced. Long-term development work gives way to a narrower focus on crisis response, even as the capacity to respond to crises is itself weakened. 

At the same time, humanitarian organisations are being asked to operate under conditions that make their work increasingly impossible. Fuel shortages disrupt vaccine cold chains. Medical supplies sit stranded in transit. The cost of reaching vulnerable populations rises faster than funding can keep pace. This is a structural contradiction. If aid is cut, and wars continue or expand, then the demand for humanitarian intervention does not fall. It increases. If that demand cannot be met through public systems, the question becomes unavoidable: what replaces it?

The answer, at least implicitly, is that the market will. But this is where the logic breaks down completely. There is no market solution to a child facing acute malnutrition in a region where food supply has collapsed. There is no profit-driven mechanism for maintaining vaccine refrigeration in a refugee camp where electricity is unreliable. There is no private incentive to stabilise fertiliser prices for smallholder farmers operating on subsistence margins. 

These are not failures of efficiency. They are not problems that do not generate returns. The idea that such problems can be resolved through market mechanisms is not simply optimistic. It is incoherent. So if we are moving away from publicly funded aid, and if market-based alternatives cannot fill the gap, then what is being proposed is not a different solution. It is the absence of one. An absence is not neutral, but borne disproportionately by those with the least capacity to absorb it.

This is where the rhetoric of ‘doing less, better’ becomes revealing. It suggests that the issue is one of excess – too many agencies, too much duplication, too much inefficiency. But the evidence points in the opposite direction. The humanitarian system is not overextended because it is wasteful. It is overextended because the scale of needs exceeds the resources available. 

Reducing those sources does not improve the system. It removes capacity from it. At the same time, military spending continues to rise. Conflicts are sustained, supported, or enabled through the same states that are reducing their commitments to humanitarian assistance. This support is not abstract. It takes the form of logistical coordination, defence cooperation, the use of airspace and infrastructure, and the steady flow of military assistance. The same states reducing aid are materially facilitating the conditions that increase the need for it. 

“Support for war and hostility to migration are presented as compatible positions. In reality, they are sequential.”

The imbalance is striking: less investment in preventing or mitigating the crisis, more investment in the conditions that produce it. It reflects a set of priorities. And those priorities have predictable outcomes. 

War displaces populations. It destroys infrastructure, livelihoods, and social networks. It creates conditions in which remaining in place is no longer viable. At the same time, reduced aid limits the ability of neighbouring regions to absorb displaced populations. The result is onward movement. Not as a choice, but as a survival strategy within a system that has removed viable alternatives.  The numbers are already moving in that direction. Millions have been displaced within Iran alone. Hundreds of thousands are crossing borders – into Syria, into Afghanistan, into Turkey. Lebanon, already hosting over a million displaced people and subject to new attacks, is seeing new waves of movement. Across the region, humanitarian capacity is under strain. 

It should not require imagination to see what happens next. People do not remain indefinitely in overcrowded camps or unstable host regions if conditions continue to deteriorate. They move further. Often towards the countries that have the capacity – economic, institutional, or geographic – to offer some degree of stability. And yet, those same countries are increasingly framing migration as a problem detached from its causes. 

The political contradiction here is stark. The states most involved in shaping the conditions that produce displacement – through military action, diplomatic alignment, economic policy – are also the ones most resistant to accepting its consequences. Support for war and hostility to migration are presented as compatible positions. In reality, they are sequential. The same policies that destabilise regions, displace populations and erode local capacity are then followed by efforts to restrict the movement of those displaced by them. It is not simply that war causes displacement. It is that the system being constructed ensures that displacement has nowhere to be absorbed. 

This is where the idea of responsibility becomes unavoidable. Not in a moral sense, though that is present, but in a structural one. If a system produces an outcome, it cannot meaningfully deny its connection to it. Causation does not disappear because it is politically inconvenient. It accumulates across decisions, policies and alliances. The current configuration of global policy – reduced aid, increased militarisation and transactional diplomacy – produces instability. That instability produces displacement. And that displacement does not remain contained. 

The question, then, is not whether migration pressures will increase. They will. The question is whether the political framework being constructed has any capacity to manage them. At present, it does not. Instead, it offers a set of partial responses that addresses symptoms while ignoring causes. Borders are tightened. Legal pathways are restricted. Deterrence measures are expanded. None of these alters the underlying dynamics. If anything, they intensify them. 

Because the same system that reduces the capacity for people to survive where they are also reduces the legal avenues through which they can move. The result is not less movement. It is a more precarious movement. This is not a sustainable equilibrium. It is a feedback loop. And it is one that reveals something more fundamental about the direction of policy. The retreat from foreign aid is not simply about saving money. The turn towards transactional diplomacy is not simply about efficiency. The framing of migration as a problem is not simply about domestic politics. Together, they reflect a narrowing of the idea of obligation. 

A system that, however imperfectly, once recognised some degree of shared responsibility for global stability is being replaced by one that prioritises immediate national interest, even where that interest undermines the conditions that make stability possible.

The difficulty is that interdependence does not disappear when it is politically inconvenient. The supply chains remain connected. The flows of capital, energy, and goods remain intertwined. And so do the consequences. Joseph Kiprono’s field is not separate from decisions made in London or Washington. It is downstream from them. And so too are the movements of people who can no longer remain there.

The question is not whether we are connected. It is whether policy is willing to recognise what that connection implies. Currently, it is not.

And that is why the system feels increasingly unstable. Not because the problems are new, but because the frameworks that once attempted –  inadequately – to manage them are being dismantled without anything coherent to replace them. What remains is a set of policies that assume problems can be contained, even as they are systematically being reproduced.