Ten years ago, the inaugural issue of Humanitarian Alternatives was published! The review was created in 2016 out of a collective desire among French-speaking NGOs and foundations to create a forum for discussion between humanitarian practitioners and the academic world.
It wasn’t a foregone conclusion. Far from it. Setting up a periodical is, in fact, a bold gamble. And in 2016, when four organisations finished pondering a project they’d started considering three years earlier, the adventure was only just beginning. Now, ten years on, we’ve published thirty-one issues, bringing together over 425 articles, written by around 530 authors. A total of 1,025 members are signed up to our website, which offers exclusive content and where our open-access articles can be read free of charge. We have around 11,000 followers on LinkedIn. Over 2,700 people receive our newsletter. We have twelve financial partners, four financial backers and eleven academic partners.
It’s easy for us to think this project’s success was inevitable. Yet nothing in advance ever guaranteed that an international review for debating and reflecting on humanitarian action would make headway in the manner it has done. In the world of publishing, the notion of a “review” draws praise as much as it draws the contention that a review is bound to remain only a niche product.
But, in our case, this “niche product” became a buzzing hive of activity: a common good for the sector of international solidarity.
Our readers, authors, and financial and academic partners all joined forces to breathe life into Humanitarian Alternatives. That was because we convinced them, quickly and clearly, of the pressing need to endow the humanitarian sector with a new space for reflection. It added to existing reviews in the field, created by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) or research centres. Perhaps we’ve managed to win our bet that we could create a forum where the world of NGOs would converse with the world of research, where humanitarianism would be tackled as much through in-depth articles as through reports, interviews, photo essays and cartoons.
We’ve always put humanitarian work at the heart of our questioning, from Ebola to Covid, from Syria to Ukraine and Gaza, from migration to the growing influence of entrepreneurial reasoning, from freedom of association being jeopardised to sexual and gender-based violence, from climate change to demographic challenges, from the impact of new technology to ever closer ties between humanitarian action and social action. Different voices and points of view have supported us to enrich the review. The authors who have embarked on this adventure with us have sent us their reflections with talent and commitment. Together, they help shed light on the work of players on the ground, help showcase contributions from researchers, and help advance the cause of populations impacted by crises or by the excessively well-oiled workings of our excessively unequal societies.
Indeed, this constant concern protects us against the pitfall of self-satisfaction, which can arise when you celebrate your own existence. So, it’s with a certain humility that now, in 2026, we’re taking the time to tell our own story. Through a selection of articles, photographs, cartoons and accounts from authors published in our columns, we’re telling you a story that has brought us together and that has, for ten years now, helped us understand and share, in a slightly better way, the limits of humanitarian action and the fate of those for whom that action is undertaken: people in need. That’s our vocation. It hasn’t changed in ten years. Recent large-scale attacks on the aid sector have made the need to keep this sector alive more pressing than ever before in order to go beyond Humanitarian Alternatives and to foster, to some extent, a human alternative to dehumanising onslaughts.
Boris Martin, Editor-in-Chief
