THIS time next week I’ll be in Geneva. It’s one of two visits I’ll make to the city over the coming month to coincide with the opening of a major retrospective exhibition of my war and documentary photography housed in the Arts Centre at the International School there. 

Often described as the “Capital of Peace”, Geneva has traditionally been recognised as a space for diplomacy and international relations, giving rise to it being the European home of the United Nations, International Red Cross and hundreds more international humanitarian organisations.  

It goes without saying that many of these organisations have had their work cut out this past year in what by any standards has been a tumultuous one in terms of world affairs.  

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With that in mind and with only days before the dawn of 2024, now would seem as appropriate a time as any then to personally reflect on this past year of global turmoil and where it might lead in the new year. 

Two stories of course have dominated the global news – the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Both are places with which I’ve long been familiar, wracked as they have been with conflict long before they became daily headlines in 2022-2023.  

Hard as it is to believe, it’s going on two years since Russian troops and tanks rolled into Ukraine, sparking the biggest conflict in Europe since the Second World War.

In that time the impact of the fighting has reverberated around the world, sending shockwaves in the supply of energy and food, causing humanitarian, social, and economic crises, and threatening to fundamentally transform the international order. 

As a new year beckons, the prospect of an immediate decisive military breakthrough for Ukraine has disappeared – for now. Add to this the fact that Ukraine’s key international support pillars are under pressure resulting in depleted supplies of critical military and economic assistance from both Washington and the EU, and it’s no surprise that the growing signs of concern in Kyiv hang over the coming year like the Sword of Damocles. 

Enough though about the geopolitical backdrop, for as ever, wars are primarily about people, their pain, suffering and loss. Beyond the headlines this past year I’ve met many of those Ukrainians whose lives have been indelibly marked by such traumatic experiences. 

People like Pavlo Petrov, a 27-year-old photographer for the State Emergency Service of Ukraine whose job is to document the dangerous work undertaken by Ukraine’s first responders.

Like so many Ukrainians, Petrov’s war is one in close-up. Be it the burned and charred remains of bodies, or the bloodied, wounded face of a man etched with shock and grief at the loss of his wife, whose lifeless body has just been pulled from the rubble of a bombed-out high-rise block, Petrov has seen it all. 

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So too has Olesya Bilyaga whom I met in the city of Izium earlier this year. A choreographer by training and now a teacher of dance in schools, she recounted to me those dark days of the Russian occupation before Izium was liberated. 

She told too of how when mass graves were unearthed containing the bodies of 440 men, women and children, her friends were among the victims.   

Elsewhere as I write, grim discoveries of a similar kind are also being made every day in Gaza where the death toll is now over 20,000 Palestinians reported killed, the vast majority women and children.  

All this killing in Gaza is expected to cost Israel another $14 billion in 2024 on top of the vast sums it has already spent in tandem with the huge war chest provided by the United States. 

This is a war that has now gone well beyond the realms of retaliation by Israel for the horrific Hamas attack in October that killed 1139 Israelis and foreign nationals. What’s worse is that as I write, there are few – if any – signs that it will stop anytime soon in 2024.  

As the US-based international relations professor Paul Poast, writing in The Atlantic magazine, poignantly observed recently, right now we might not be living through a world war but this is certainly a world at war.

And so as 2023 ends, Ukraine and Gaza dominate news in the Western world, yet more than 50 countries around the planet right now are gripped by conflicts that affect a staggering quarter of the world’s population. 

In Sudan, which so typically for Africa only briefly caught the world’s attention in 2023, eight months of fighting have left more than half the country in need of humanitarian aid and forced some six million people from their homes, making it the world’s largest displacement crisis. Some 19 million children are without education as the conflict has shuttered thousands of schools. 

In Myanmar meanwhile, another ruinous civil war is marked by myriad atrocities and reports of war crimes, while elsewhere from Syria and Yemen to most recently Iraq, conflict rumbles on.

It’s not just all-out wars either that are taking their toll, for in places like Haiti and Mexico, gangs and cartels continuously menace governments and yet more civilians are caught in the crossfire.

All of this comes on top of the prospect of a major war breaking out in East Asia, such as by China invading the island of Taiwan. 

It’s these global conflicts too that fuel the surge in transnational migration, not the “deliberately destabilising … weaponisation of migration”, Rishi Sunak’s toxic rhetoric referred to at a recent festival in Rome organised by the far-right Brothers of Italy party where he looked eminently comfortable.  

Next week as I walk around the hundreds of photographs on show in my exhibition in Geneva some of which were taken only a few months ago, it will be a sobering reminder that the world is still a very troubled place. 

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Occasionally, from those who encounter my images or read my journalism, I hear complaints of how “depressing” they are.

I make no apologies for this because knowing the reality of the world in which we live is more vital than ever. 

More than 40 years ago when I first started reporting and photographing war, I never set out simply to be a harbinger of bad tidings, for oddly enough in all wars are to be found the spirit of caring and selflessness as well as cruelty.  

But sadly, as I look towards the year ahead I can see little respite from war in 2024. That said, I so very much hope I’m wrong.

On that note, can I wish you all a peaceful and happy New Year wherever you might be.