The single biggest cause of humanitarian suffering around the world is conflict. The biggest reason it's hard to help people is the way the men with the guns and the bombs behave in conflict.
As you say, conflicts are lasting longer than they used to. It's not just about state groups; there are a lot of non-state groups. In a lot of conflicts, the number of different groups has exploded, which makes things harder to deal with, and we've seen a significant, meaningful decline in compliance with the laws of war—the use of siege and starvation, for example, or rape or other atrocities, as a deliberate, systematic tactic of war.
Too often, aid workers find themselves in the middle of that problem. Along with journalism, I think aid work is one of the world's most dangerous professions now. Sometimes, with the non-state armed groups, it's about aid workers being caught up accidentally in what's basically a criminal enterprise. On other occasions, though, I'm afraid that it's a deliberate targeting of the aid system as a tactic. We do have a responsibility to keep everybody who works for us safe, but we also have a responsibility to reach as many people as we can.
The most important approach we can take is to try to win the trust and confidence of the parties on all sides, and try to persuade them that it's actually in their interest for aid to reach ordinary people. That's the most important thing we have to do, but there are circumstances where that doesn't work, and we have to find workarounds. We have to take a degree of risk, and we have to balance that. These issues are ones that certainly land on my desk every day.
Every day, I'm faced with an issue about whether to allow a particular mission to go to a particular hotspot in a particular country, and we think about that a lot. We do the best we can to protect our staff, most of whom are nationals of the countries in which we're working, but also international—