Foreign aid can be defined as an international transfer of resources (capital, goods, or services) on a voluntary basis from one country or international organization (a donor) to another country (recipient). This transfer aims to benefit the population of a developing country in the form of either grants or loans. Foreign aid includes military, economic, or humanitarian international assistance. The United Nations target for foreign aid is 0.7 percent of a donor country’s gross national income.

In the post-Cold War context, foreign aid combines humanitarian intervention with political action and can be considered as a pillar of political humanitarianism. Humanitarian intervention was limited by the principle of non-interference into the domestic affairs of the sovereign states in the post-1945 bipolar world. In the multipolar world after 1991, foreign aid has become a product of the interventionist approach to international relations (Macrae and Leader 2000).

Foreign aid is based on the foreign policy interests of donors, embedded in humanitarian and development projects, and on the engagement between aid organizations and political authorities in times of crisis on issues of population access and aid distribution (Ehrenfeld 2004). Donor foreign policy interests vary from getting access to the country’s strategic natural resources in exchange for aid to reducing the number of refugees coming out of crisis zones. This means that, in some cases, the provision of foreign aid benefits the donor countries more than the recipients (Atlani-Duault and Dozon 2011). The dependency between the donor and recipient countries is indeed two way: “although dependent on foreign aid, several countries in the Global South significantly contribute to the prosperity of the Global North via interest payments, subcontracts, exploitation of resources, and labor force” (De Lauri 2016: 3).

Aid organizations must negotiate on population access and aid distribution with political authorities in crisis countries to ensure that aid is delivered to non-combatants on a needs basis, regardless of which side of the conflict they belong to (Macrae and Leader 2000). The principles of neutrality and impartiality of aid provision aim to ensure that aid cannot be used as a weapon of war by antagonistic parties, by blocking or cutting supplies to a political rival or enriching people in power through bribes, for example. This, however, is not always the case, and foreign aid can become yet another battlefield of conflicting perceptions, identities, relationships, and interests between the donors, aid organizations, local authorities, and populations in need (Dunn 2012).

Foreign aid is highly political and thus closely related to the humanitarian–development–security nexus, where separation between the apolitical (humanitarian) and the political (development, security) no longer holds (Lewis 2016). An emergency can evolve into a chronic humanitarian crisis, while an armed conflict can develop into a frozen or recurring military activity, both requiring long-term solutions, where humanitarian aid becomes development assistance (Atlani-Duault and Dozon 2011). Afghanistan and Iraq are examples of prolonged armed conflicts, whereas Vietnam and the Philippines are examples of countries with recurring natural disasters. In conflict zones, security is no longer considered in merely military terms but includes human, social, economic, and environmental dimensions of aid programming as peace-making. Similarly, practices such as disaster risk reduction and risk management are now employed as part of development aid aimed at preventing future humanitarian crises and regulating the delivery of humanitarian assistance when a crisis occurs.

The intersections of humanitarian–development–security issues in foreign aid have paved the way for the term “complex emergencies” (Macrae and Leader 2000). This idea has complicated an understanding of what a humanitarian crisis is and what type of assistance it requires. The proliferation of various tools to address crises has also contributed to the complexity and compartmentalization of emergencies. Such a professionalization and bureaucratization of aid has focused on predetermined programming solutions, rather than solutions stemming from the identified problems on the ground (Dunn 2012).

Because of these developments, academics and practitioners keep battling with the following questions: how to separate aid from political goals and to do more good than harm, how to better understand lived experiences of aid by giving and receiving sides, and how to use critiques to improve aid effectiveness.