In his 2021 book, Night on Earth, Davide Rodongo, professor of international history and politics at the Geneva Graduate Institute, writes about humanitarian action during the 20th century interwar period. “What they aimed to do was delusional”, he told Lars Peter. “The reality is they did a few little good things in a few places…And they aimed to civilize the entire Near East.”
According to Davide, historians often argue that the past teaches us nothing. And yet, his recounting of the humanitarian sector’s inter-war period rhymes with the major themes we talk about on this podcast: localization, professionalism, paternalism and technology. Together, he and Lars Peter talk about what (and who) has changed, cracks in the humanitarian narrative, and how to tell the story right.
Davide’s book:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/night-on-earth/2BB5FC4E3AAE925C0AD6875F519BFD4B
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at
95-A-night-on-earth
(0:00 - 6:40)
wo world wars, so from around:That's not a period of history I have thought a lot about, at least not in terms of what humanitarian action looked like, and it was fascinating to talk to Davide and think through how many of the issues they were facing back then are still with us today, and to discover how similar we are to those previous generations of humanitarians. We also had a chance to speak about the new humanitarians that Davide meets at the Graduate Institute, and how they are different or similar to the generation that he and I belong to. All in all, it's an interesting, clever, and fun conversation, and I'm sure you will really enjoy it.
Once you listen, tell us what you like and what you didn't like. Drop us an email on info at humanitarian.org, do a post on LinkedIn, review us wherever you listen, and share the show around to people you think might like it. Most importantly, enjoy the conversation.
the very end of World War I,:This is my night on Earth, and exactly like the movie, which is structured around episodes, I have my taxis, who are humanitarian and humanitarian institutions, the taxi drivers who are women and men that were driving these taxis, and the client, and the client are supposed to be the recipients of humanitarian aid. And so, just like in the movie, the taxi is supposed to know better how to bring the client from A to B, and in this case, saving the lives of these recipients of aid. But the reality is very, very different, and the stories are way more twisted, and there is tragedy, human tragedy.
And so, it seemed to me as a very good narrative framework, and a metaphor that really goes beyond what happened. It's a nice way of telling a story, because in the end, historians are supposed to. Yeah, and we should say that Jim Jarmusch's film, it takes place one night, I think we start in New York, is that right? Yeah, and then five taxi drives that go poorly each in their way.
, the period you're studying,:And of course, we know that after the Second World War, there was an outpouring of solidarity with people who had been affected by the war, and there was a willingness to establish a global governance that really addressed some of the issues we had experienced. Is it the same we see after the First World War? No, the First World War is a little bit different. There are similarities, because of course, if you think about the setting up of the League of Nations, this is the first time ever the world comes up with, or the international community, which is a Western community of colonial imperial governments.
use the war ends in Europe in: lly different with respect to:Some of them are really rooted in the Near and Middle East. I'm thinking about the missionaries. They reconfigured themselves in new institutions.
-:The most important of them is the Near East. There are a bunch of very new actors, super interesting to study, such as the American Relief Administration, which is an extremely wealthy, rich institution. And they are particularly interesting because so many young American soldiers decide to engage with the American Relief Administration.
They are very present in the Caucasus, in Georgia, in today's Azerbaijan, in Armenia. Save the Children is there. The ICRC, the International Committee of the Red Cross is there.
were landing in this area in:And missionaries were particularly important simply because they had expertise, knowledge, and knowledge of languages. Not necessarily Turkish, but many of them were helping out Armenians, for instance. They spoke Armenian currently, and this for the region was clearly an advantage.
Now you studied this period, I'm sure, because you feel that they're important lessons for today. And when you look at how these actors operate, some of them you say have a lot of resources, other others have a really deep contextual knowledge. What strikes you about the way they engage with their passengers in the taxes? To some respects, a few things have not changed.
We are who we are, and we bring wherever we go our baggage and ideas about how to do things. And very often, I'm not saying this in a very cynical way because these people, just like humanitarians today, are well persuaded that they were doing whatever was possible to save lives. So there was no cynicism in what they were doing.
But at the same time, there wasn't a lot of arrogance because they thought that the way of rescuing lives was the right way and the only way. And very often, they were not ready to listen to what local populations had to say, what they thought. Is it sort of the white man's burden sort of a way of thinking about things? Absolutely.
is exactly the same thing in:And again, I'm not condemning this. I'm trying to understand. The contrary would have been extremely surprising, right? They were cultivated European or American or Canadian elites, and they brought with them what they knew in terms of humanitarian practices, whether this had to be, whether this was related to health practices or education or the setting up of orphanages or whatever it is that they were doing.
Even technology was absolutely central in what they were doing. If you, and this is why studying geography and also military history, though today not so many people do that, is so important because if you have a look at where refugee camps were set up, this is systematically very close to ports, railways, and humanitarians back then had a very hard time helping out people on the move. They needed people to be somewhere.
(:And they were forcing people to stop precisely to set up these camps so that the aid could be started. And so there is a kind of vicious circle that starts because in a way they were channeling or they were indicating to people on the move that it was better for them to stop. Was it really better to stop? This is the question that we as historians have to ask ourselves.
(:And I think the interesting insight there is that the technology shapes the assistance we give, right? Absolutely. And this is still the case today. You were talking about lessons.
For historians it's very, very difficult because we tend to think that history teaches nothing. But certainly this is a very good way when you're teaching a class to explain to students that, yeah, artificial intelligence today is extremely important, but technology has always been extremely important for humanitarians who back then were geeks. The most geeky of all were the missionaries themselves.
They still are. They still are. They love Kodak cameras.
They were very, very well informed about calories and the right amount of calories that children or infants had to take in order to survive, et cetera, et cetera. All these things still shape up the humanitarian world today. Now the missionaries, I imagine they're there for years and years and they set up a church and have some kind of local interface that is of the society as well.
What about Save the Children and the ICRC? Are they just operating in a vacuum, hiring their own staff? What do they do? It's a very good question. And this is one of the problems that we have when we study this kind of activities, because of course, in the archives, it's all about the white man's burden. And so what you see is heroes all over the place.
a huge operation in Greece in:The entire machine or the number of Americans in Greece is 60 or 55. At times, they could go up to 70, but it was never more than 70 people covering an entire country. So you suspect that there is another population hidden somewhere in the archives, but you rarely see them.
So to go back to your question, the point is precisely how we can tell the story right, how we can give back the right place to these people. It seems as if Greece had no doctors, no nurses, no health system, which is completely untrue. And if you were to read through the perspective that is offered by these archives, it would be very, very wrong.
And so as historians, we have to resist. And just like good journalists would do, we have to cross-reference and to find references elsewhere. And then the story becomes very, very different.
There are tensions and there is a different role played by local women and men, by local leads, people that are the go-between with local communities, as it happens everywhere in the world. And suppliers of transport and commodities that surely are procured in the country. I'm sure they didn't ship in everything, right? And so there must have been quite a lot of economic activity around this place.
(:Absolutely. And this, to go back to your question, was precisely the advantage that missionaries had, because these missionaries had been in Anatolia, in Asia Minor, and in other regions of the Ottoman Empire for centuries. Many of them didn't want it to convert.
ced to move, especially after: (:So they crossed into the secular world and put themselves at the service of the humanitarians. Exactly. And this is one of the reasons why I think, and I'm so opposed to imagining the origins of an allegedly modern humanitarianism as being fully secular.
I think religious organizations well into the 20th century are extremely important, and I would argue they are still important today. I couldn't agree more. I'm a product of that world myself.
(:So what's interesting, as we speak, I find myself sort of superimposing today's critique of the humanitarian sector on what I'm hearing you say. And I wonder, are there any of the actors back then who stop up for a second and say, hey, this is not right. This seems strange.
Okay, we are here to help. But what I did today didn't seem to help anybody. Is there any sort of crack in the hero narrative? There are plenty of cracks.
And you see them in journals, the more intimate kind of writings that these people were allowed to produce. That's also a very fundamental difference with today's humanitarian sector. Today reports are formatted and the delegate or the woman or man, the spot has to write within boxes and they have to follow a certain procedure.
Back then, they were quite free to write whatever they want. And you can clearly see in some of them, some kind of doubts popping up, emerging. What am I doing here? Give us a flavor.
Give us a couple of examples. Well, for instance, when it came to precisely people on the move and this impossibility to help them, in the end, those who were following these populations, they could have been missionaries or more secular humanitarians, they realized that they couldn't help. And so they were trying to figure out what to do.
Epidemics were rife. Some of them died. They saw their colleagues dying.
So they realized that what they were trying to do was completely inadequate. But on the other hand, we should not forget that this civilizational posture was very, very present. So for some of them, the very idea of doubting was impossible.
There was no doubt. So in the more intimate kind of writings, you see both attitudes, those who start doubting and those who could never make space for doubt in their writing, in their thinking. What are they doubting though? Are they doubting, oh, we didn't get this one right, so people died and that's not good? Or are they doubting, why the heck am I here? Are they doubting the very project? Or is it more within the frame? It's within the frame.
It's within the frame. They would not question the good reasons that the institutions had to do that in the first place. So that seems to be a key difference to today, where I think when we talk about decolonizing, and you hear very fierce criticism of the whole hero narrative.
And I think a lot of us who have worked in this sector, you were lucky you chose to become an academic. I actually worked inside the hamster wheel, so to speak. I mean, you do question, what are the motivations here? Was it a right thing to do? So it's a very profound, I think, self-reflection or self-flagellation, if you want to stick to the religious language that's going on.
(:Absolutely, absolutely. This is why working on the beginning of the 20th century is so interesting, because you can, with a bird's eye view, look at the cracks, the continuities, the ruptures, the changes, and reflect on these things. And so precisely, if you examine everything through the prism of doubt and self-criticism, you can clearly see that the entire sector is in a different place today from 1920s.
So there are things that, as a historian, I can say in terms of motivations, doubts, and the very profound meaning of humanitarian aid, international humanitarian aid, as of today. One of the things that you have to always remember when you study this particular time period is that the vast majority of Western humanitarians were not revolutionaries. At best, they were reformists, but they were very religious, very capitalist, and they trusted the imperial mission of their own state, whether they came from the United States of America, Great Britain, or France, which explains, to go back to sovereignty, why so many of these international institutions withdraw when the mandates are set up in Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and so on and so forth, because then colonial authorities will take over.
(:So now we can do it properly. Civilization arrived. Yes.
And so our role, we fill the hole, the gap. Now it's over, and new authorities will take over and do the right job and finish it. Well, at least they had an exit strategy.
(:Yeah. Oh, yes. Yes.
What they are way less keen to admit is that so many of them ran out of money. Right. That's another problem that they had.
(:So in 1924, 25, they are desperate, trying to find the best exit, the most honorable exit strategy for them, because they don't have any. So we've dived into quite heavy criticism of these actors. But when you look at it from such a long historical perspective, what was the impact of their interventions? What was the good that they did? This is very hard to say.
I mean, I give you two examples. If you think about an infant, an Armenian infant and an orphan that was saved from the road or from wherever he was found by one of these institutions, and this person could grow up in a relatively safe environment, etc., then you will tend to say, oh, this was a very, very successful kind of operation. There is a huge discrepancy between what these institutions aimed to do and what they actually did.
And what they aimed to do was delusional. The reality is they did a few little good things in a few places. What did they aim to do? They had to civilize.
And they aimed to civilize the entire Near East, as they used to call it, which was a delusional project. And in fact, talking about differences between yesterday and today, before the beginning of the war in Ukraine, there was this huge talk about nexus and nexuses between humanitarian aid and development, etc. For these people at the beginning of the 20th century, there is no difference.
Humanitarian programs encompass part of development in so many ways. All humanitarian programs have an educational dimension, public health and education in health, agriculture. Of course, there are no industrial programs because, of course, the Near Easterners are considered to be less civilized.
(:So it's not about creating industries, but agriculture for sure. And so this goes back to this civilizational perception. And even in terms of curricula, school curricula, so many Americans transfer curricula that were imposed on African-Americans in the American South, or autochthonous populations, First Nations, and so on and so forth in the American continent.
(:They are then applied in Near East because these Americans think that the level of civilization of these people is exactly the same of African-American back home. So they transfer these ideas without thinking for a second that these are not exactly the same populations. And this whole idea of ranking is weird, to say the least.
So you have these ideas which are very different from today. Do they manage to do so? No. I could give you so many examples of failures.
(:So what happens when they have to write back home about how they spent the money and what they've been doing? How do they deal with this failure? Do they move the goalpost? It's exactly as you say. They move the goalpost. And in this respect, the narratives are not so different from today.
We're doing a good job, but it's unfinished business. We need your support a little bit more. Please give us money to continue to carry on doing this good job.
(:And because of external situations, we could not complete what we had said we would do. Please give us money. This is exactly the narrative that they put forward.
(:And we are just about to find a way of doing what we set out to do. Yes, exactly. So are things so different today? I don't think so.
Because the ways in which fundraising is articulated today, if we had to study it closely, we would find certainly many examples of many institutions that keep asking for more funding. It is hard to find examples of the opposite. And I think MSF, to their credit, they are one of the few organizations who every now and then go, no, actually, we're fine.
(:Yeah, yeah, exactly. But precisely, I mean, the example of MSF is a very good example, because you can say, well, things have changed. And there are other ways of doing this.
(:First of all, funding ourselves. And the example of MSF is very interesting and different from some of the example of the beginning of the 20th century, even though there were also institutions that work with subscriptions, individual subscriptions. But precisely, this study on the very beginning of the 20th century tells us a number of things on practices and motivations, as I said before, of humanitarian actors and institutions.
(:Is it all private money they work with? I mean, the churches obviously have a very strong position for fundraising and charities. So it's not government money? It's very different. So many Americans used religious networks to fundraise.
And it moved through national offices in the U.S. This is particularly the case of the Near East Relief, which was by far the most important mix, secular and religious organization, mainly Protestant. But it's very, very different for the American Relief Administration that works with the U.S. government money and to some extent, the American Red Cross, too. So you see, you have examples, ways of proceeding that are very different.
(:Save the Children didn't use British government money. But when you go to Kew Gardens, so the National Archives in London, you will find that the connection of Save the Children people with MPs, with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Foreign Office are extremely important and they are facilitated in a number of ways when they are on the spot because they can use the consular network and so on and so forth. So yeah, they don't use government money, but the links with governments are important, significant.
(:And to what extent do governments see them as, and please excuse the expression, force multipliers? To some extent, this is the case. Save the Children in Greece is exactly that. And it's used to counterbalance the League of Nations because the British government look at Nansen and the Nansen office and Nansen individually with an awful lot of suspicion.
They don't like him particularly and they prefer to work with Save the Children because they find that since they're Britons, they can trust them more and they are a multiplier because they will make the British empire look good and the British government look good. Just remind us who Nansen is. Nansen worked for the League of Nations and he was the High Commissioner for Refugees back then.
And so he was in charge of setting up a few missions. He had no money. So there was, contrary to what we tend to think today, especially in Geneva, it could do so much less with respect to other actors.
(:Now you have the privilege of shaping the impressionable minds of the new generations of humanitarians at the Graduate Institute. How do they react to your research? Well, I think today students, they will always tell you that they don't like history, they don't like to work on historical period that are far away from what is happening right now. So I never sell history, but then I gently introduce them to history as a method of thinking.
And so to introduce the longue durée and this effort to go back to precisely detect continuities and changes and ruptures. This is what they do. So generally speaking, they react pretty well.
Of course, what they want is to have a decolonial critical approach, which is more than understandable, and this is what I offer to them. So I would say that they accept well this kind of approach. So they say, okay, we can see what you found back in that period that resonates with us.
And that's, of course, not right in these ways. How do they look at today's system? This is where I tell them to slow down. And rather than judge, my effort as an academic is to make them understand in a critical, cold, analytical way, what is a clinical way.
That's what I'm supposed to be to them. It's not about reacting with their guts and emotions, which are important. But first of all is to understand the context.
You know, we were talking about geography a second ago. If you ignore the geography of Yemen or, you know, whatever is of Myanmar, Bangladesh, there's no way you can understand why this moving, where they're going. It's simple things that really matter, even in the era of, you know, full access to digital data.
(:And so when you look at today's humanitarian sector, you live in Geneva or you work in Geneva and you're very close to the core institutions we have in the humanitarian sector. What do they, what do you wish they understood that you can see because of your research? What are the lessons you really wish that we would take with us to work every single day when we come? Well, one of the things that is very easy, first of all, let me say something because I think it's really important, at least it's really important to me, you know, to do what I do sitting very comfortably in a very nice office with a view on the Jeddah and Saleh makes my life very easy. And again, my purpose is not to judge, but it's really to understand what I would like humanitarians today to bring in their backpacks when they go somewhere is this humility and modesty and attitude, be ready to really understand the context.
(:And to understand the context, one has to slow down. And I understand it is extremely difficult to slow down when you're working in a situation of an emergency after an earthquake or because war or whatever is the situation. This is something that I do understand.
(:The second thing that I would like to tell them is to stay away from buzzwords that seem to contaminate every, you know, every single year there is a new one from empowerment to resilience, from resilience to localization, from localization to something else. And these buzzwords, when they are not used properly, they do more damage than anything else because they become labels that are, you know, used n'importe comment, as we would have it in French, without any, you know, without any critical thinking behind it. And I think they could turn into very colonial weapons.
We should never forget that the masters of colonization, sorry, the masters of localizations were colonial rulers. They knew very well how to that was precisely one of the weapons of colonial empires. So before using localization, we should be very, very, very careful about what we mean.
And when you combine localizations with resilience, the results can be excellent. It can also be very awful. Yeah.
One thing I know for sure, power doesn't evaporate just because you call it something else. Yeah, that's a very, very nice way of putting it. I cannot agree more.
And precisely to study power is and remains very, very important. And this is one of the things that I tell the students, just like follow the money, because if you have no sense of the magnitude, you tend to misrepresent what some of these humanitarian institutions can or cannot do. Yeah.
And if that, if the institutional narrative, the narrative about us as individuals, as institutions, as a community of practice, if that is detached from the economic reality of our industry, and I use that word deliberately, then it just becomes poetry. Absolutely. And you're right to call it industry or a business because we know that because we live in Geneva, many people are professionals.
They are paid on a monthly basis. This is a job for them. And again, I'm not cynical, but that's a reality and we have to deal with it.
(:I absolutely agree. I mean, we want the best qualified people on board. We do a very important job, right? But the question is, I think, whether the professionalization and the whole superstructure we have created on top of the humanitarian principles and the way we interpret what they mean and how they're done correctly, whether that means that we have become very good at doing things right, but we're not doing the right things.
Precisely. Right? So we were technically very proficient, but what about purpose? What about respecting the agency of the individual? Are you forcing that individual into a camp? Are you letting them move where they would like to go? All of those issues. I think that's where we're struggling today.
Absolutely. Two points to react to your remarks. The first is that with ultra-professionalization comes the risks of arrogance, maybe different arrogance from the beginning of the 20th century, but there is that.
But no less colonial. No less colonial or colonial in a different way. Right? And the other thing is that one of the things that I tend to tell to our students is that because of narratives of ultra-professionalization of the humanitarian sector business, we tend to forget the place that today volunteers still play.
And so I draw their attention to, for instance, we were talking about geeks before. So those people that were able to use GPS data and make sense of them, and very often in a number of different situations. So that happened around the world in the last 15, 20 years helped out on a voluntary basis.
(:This is a different kind of voluntarism from the kind of voluntarism of the very beginning of the 20th century that still plays a role in our very digital era. So yeah. I couldn't agree more.
And I think it's fascinating to see how some organizations like OpenStreetMap and others really have leveraged new technologies to create a lot of value for operations. On a voluntary basis. On a voluntary basis.
Yes. So this is also probably the only... To go back to the question of the role of the academic in all that is precisely to step back, or as we would have it in French, faire un pas de côté, to draw the attention of a younger generation of students. And our students are particularly interested in an international career, some of them in humanitarian organizations, precisely to tell them, look, you think that this is completely different.
You think that this is ultra-professionalized and you are absolutely right. But wait a second, volunteers have not disappeared. We have to seek them elsewhere, but they still exist.
(:And maybe we have to be them ourselves also. Because one of the differences I can see from when I started to today is we didn't study humanitarian action. We didn't have a template for what to do to the extent that we have today.
Today it's a very well-defined set of expectations and bullets on your job description that you have to sort of fill out. And that was very different. And the way you got into the business was by volunteering and trying out different things, and suddenly there was a job, and then you got a job.
(:That's true. And because of our age and experiences, I also do see a fundamental difference, at least when it comes to students coming from the West, from Europe, from North America in the 1990s. And because of the end of the Cold War, there was a kind of profound optimism.
The new world order, an international community based on the respect of international law and norms, et cetera. Neoliberalism for sure was also part of this ideological drive that motivated many people back then. But more profoundly and differently, I would say there was a kind of optimism that made sense and went along with these ideals of a certain kind of humanitarianism.
Today, it seems to me that things are a little different. I have to say, I feel bad about partly sounding like an old fart who thinks that young people are not willing to put in the work. That's not how I see them at all.
I am actually impressed with the young people I meet in the way that actually a lot of them insist on dragging their feelings and their instincts into the work, and maybe rebelling a bit against your cold analytical approach that you described earlier. And there's a lot of strength in that. I think there's a lot of strength in taking seriously your gut instincts.
No, this just sucks. This is not right. I don't want things to be like this.
I want to change that. I think that is really what I like about a lot of the new generation, the sort of under 30s I meet. And I think because that's a powerful tool against that hype of professionalism we just spoke about.
(:I agree. I agree. I think that probably our generation was helped out by this sort of diffuse optimism that pushed us, right? It was a plus.
Today, probably this generation, and it's very hard to generalize, so I will stop there with a few generalizations. But I've got the impression that there is a deliberate effort by individual to seek in a way more intimate way the resources to push yourself beyond and to do things. It's precisely because, as you said, it sucks.
And you feel instinctively that it sucks, that something needs to be done to address massive violations of the most basic rights, cases of discrimination, racism, and other things. And this is really important, I think. And I don't want to dismiss it at all.
(:No, I think it's a real strength. The way I do worry about them sometimes is that it's also a very vulnerable position to be in. And if you want to work in humanitarian action, I think one thing you have to confront again and again is profound failure in your own actions, right? You will make mistakes and you'll make serious mistakes.
And you have to be able to live with that. And if you're paralyzed by fear of doing something wrong, because you're trying so hard to be a good person and so hard to make the world a better place, it's a lot to put on your own shoulders. But that's precisely what we should be, we academics should do, is precisely to teach the importance of failing, the importance of imperfection, the importance of try and try again and to persevere.
That's the idea of producing perfect papers is something that should be completely eliminated from the academic world. And we should cherish imperfect papers full of scars, right? But I'm not entirely sure that the academic system provides students with this kind of confidence. But it's a brilliant thing that you came on to humanitarian because this is the perfect segue into putting you into a highly uncomfortable space, right? Because you're a historian and you like to look back and sort of figure out what things were.
We're going to force you now to do the opposite. I'd like to ask you to give us a prediction for what will happen, a significant world event that you predict will happen within the next six months. And then what we'll do in six months time, we'll call you back and we'll ask you whether you were right or not.
And then we'll have a conversation about that. And I should say that this is hugely unfair. We didn't prepare you for this.
We just sprung it on you. It's a new thing for us. But if you're game, we'd love to hear your prediction.
Okay. I will start by saying that historians are extremely well known to be very bad prophets. How many historians predicted the end of the Soviet Union? Even among Sovietologists, very few of them.
Or the Arab Spring. Or the Arab Spring or many other events. So I will certainly say something that will be completely wrong.
I predict, and I'm really sorry to sound pessimistic, but I have a very hard time being optimistic when it comes to the Middle East. I fear that the situation in the West Bank, in Gaza, and in Lebanon is going to be worse off in six months. Many more people and civilians will die.
International humanitarian law will be even more disrespected than it is today, if possible. If it's possible. Contrary to what some people might think, I'm not entirely persuaded that there will be a geographical extension of the war beyond Lebanon, which is already a disaster as it is.
And I'm referring to Iran, but then again, I'm not a specialist of geopolitics. And this is no matter who will be the next American president. I do not see a mental difference at that level.
I don't think that:And to move to a third area, and I'm thinking about Sudan, I think that this will keep being the forgotten humanitarian crisis, because the center stage, at least in the West, will be completely taken up by the Middle East and Ukraine, because this is where European interests lie. And so the consequences of this attention to these war zones will unfortunately have even worse consequences on Sudan, where the humanitarian crisis is absolute. So a contained but deteriorating situation in the Middle East and in Ukraine? Yeah.
A deteriorating but also contained deterioration in Sudan? Do you think that'll spread? Yeah. No, I think it's already so bad today, contained or not contained. I just see deterioration, because I don't know who is going to help Sudanese civilians in six months time.
I do take the point of view of the civilians, probably because of the kind of studies and the kind of historian I am. That's a brilliant prediction. And I look forward to talking to you.
I don't know if it's brilliant. It's very sad. Yes, it is.
And I don't want to give the impression that I am a pessimistic person, but I'm trying to predict, being as cold and clinical as I can. But I would like to add a word of optimism, because I, of course, hope that things would look very different. And if there is one thing that I would love is for you to call me in six months and tell me you were so damn wrong, and there is peace in the Middle East, and the war in Ukraine ended, and massive humanitarian support is happening in Sudan.
This is what I really would like to hear from you in six months. Inshallah. Inshallah.
(:Davide, thank you so much for coming on True Humanitarian. It's been a fantastic conversation, and I look forward to touching base with you in six months. Thank you so much, Ash.
See you.