Since the late 1980s international aid for development has fallen while humanitarian assistance for emergencies has increased. This change of emphasis reflects the collapse of the USSR and consequent political instability in the former Soviet Union, its former satellites and client states. It also reflects donor disillusion with the failure of many development projects. Much humanitarian assistance is delivered in complex emergencies such as in Angola, Somalia, Rwanda, the Caucasus and former Yugoslavia. Almost without exception these emergencies relate directly to global, regional, national and local political instability created by the ‘new international political order’. Many of the emergencies have roots in the colonial era and a deep history in cultural tensions loosely described as ethnic conflict. Many complex emergencies entail enormous violence, massacres of civilian populations, deliberate destruction of the means of production, ethnic cleansing, torture and rape, displacement of population, refugeedom, social and economic collapse, traumatisation and psycho‐social problems of whole populations and state collapse. Complex emergencies are dynamic, characterised by uncertainty and by rapid and unpredictable changes affecting all aspects of life.
