In the North theres a new set of politics that we haven't fully understood yet. In the US, people seem to be trying to recreate the cold war in other forms. It's a bit like a security blanket. I find it hard to believe that there will that kind of global conflict again. Even within a single ideology we're beginning to allow ourselves different views, shades of grey.
Governments are often very stupid institutions.
But in this new freedom, aid agencies are intervening directly in the heart of conflicts in a way that they would never have done before. It's a bit like the medium is the message, form dictates content. The fact that you can go into a war zone and work, means everyone in aid agencies wants to do it. In so doing, they've massively increased the opportunities for people to go and spend money, quite possibly with very little to show for it. Getting on for a decade since the fall of the Berlin Wall, aid agencies are learning that no one really understands conflict, we don't know how to intervene in wars, that we may very well be provoking conflict or sustaining conflict or fuelling through the physical goods that we bring in, or simply because of our presence and the expectations that raises.