Paul Spiegel, a former senior official at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), recently published a paper in which he states “the humanitarian system was not designed to address the types of complex conflicts that are happening at present.” His paper, published earlier this month as part of a special series on health and humanitarian issues in the medical journal The Lancet, explains how more than 65 million people have been displaced by either conventional war or other kinds of violence or conflict, and how the current humanitarian aid system is “no longer fit for purpose.”
Spiegel, who is also a physician and professor at Johns Hopkins University, was recently interviewed by Malaka Gharib for NPR. If you want to read the whole interview, you can click here.
And today we celebrate...