What should we do about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? For philanthropy, that’s been both a very easy question to answer, and an incredibly hard one.
In the seven weeks since the crisis began, donors big and small have sent a flood of humanitarian aid to the embattled nation and its citizens. That decision was a no-brainer for most. Russia is a clear aggressor, an undemocratic one at that, attacking Ukraine, a democratic underdog forced to defend itself on its home turf. It’s been right versus wrong, good guy versus bad guy. From the standpoint of relief fundraising, it’s a compelling narrative.
But what happens when we look past relief and even post-war rebuilding for a moment — vital as they are — to questions like: Could philanthropy have helped prevent this? Or what can grantmakers do to reduce the likelihood of wars like this breaking out in the future?
Judging from long-term downward trends in philanthropic funding for peace and security, you might get the impression that most funders’ answers to those two questions, if they’re being candid, would be “no” and “nothing.” Organizations engaged in international peacebuilding were once more prominent on philanthropy’s radar, but they have fallen on lean times. It’s a trend that dates back to, and is partially attributable to, the end of the Cold War.
“There has been a decrease, certainly. In the last 10 to 20 years, there have been fewer and fewer foundations that are interested in peace and security. And, you know, less urgency, less support.” That was Stephen Del Rosso, a former diplomat and current program director for international peace and security at the Carnegie Corporation of New York — one of only a handful of major funders still deeply invested in the field.
With Ukraine in the forefront, we’re led to wonder if that’ll change. Will this invasion and its yet-unknown aftermath rekindle funders’ flagging enthusiasm for peacebuilding? And if it does, what might it look like for philanthropy to help build — or rebuild — some 21st-century iteration of the liberal international order, an order that many now see as crumbling away?
A U.S.-led international system
It was against the backdrop of the last land war in Europe, World War II, that American philanthropists like David Rockefeller and his peers came together to back an idealistic project. It also seemed an unlikely one at the time. Following total war, they looked toward a sustainable peace.
Using their wealth to build up organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution and others, mid-century magnates and prominent foundations were one key to the establishment of what has come to be known as the liberal international order (also referred to as the “rules-based,” or, tellingly, “U.S.-led” international order).
It’s a loose term, but it usually describes the broad set of institutions and mechanisms that have been front and center in international affairs for the past seven decades. That is, institutions like the United Nations (headquartered on a parcel of New York land donated by the Rockefellers), the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization — as well as the ideological imperative to promote liberal democracy over authoritarian rule.
Historians and political scientists differ over whether this U.S.-led order truly helped avert massive world conflict over the past 75 years, or whether nuclear deterrence and mutually assured destruction played a bigger role. But according to Stephen Heintz, president and CEO at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund — one of the late David Rockefeller’s major philanthropic legacies — philanthropy was one part of the heady mix that produced the international order as it stands.
“I think it was a contributing role,” he told me. “Philanthropy is a good source of support for research and the development of ideas. And coming out of the Second World War, there was a tremendous need for rethinking the world. It really led people to understand that if this wasn’t going to happen again, there needed to be some serious conceptual work done. And there needed to be some institution-building done.”
Fast forward 75 years, and the concepts and institutions developed at the time are no longer working effectively as guarantors of international peace and economic stability. Commentary, some of it breathless, has painted Putin’s invasion as a nail in the coffin of the old international order.
But even if the U.S.-led system isn’t dead yet, a rogue Russia is only one challenge to its viability. In a multipolar world where the interests of Russia, China and a rising Global South interact with those of the U.S. and its allies, there is, once again, a need for some serious conceptual work, institution-building, and good old cross-border engagement and understanding on every level.
Philanthropy backs away
But where is philanthropy in that picture? Well, it’s not very prominent right now. While an annual tally by the Peace and Security Funders Group and Candid has placed total philanthropic support for international peacebuilding in the low hundreds of millions in recent years, that amounts to around just 1% of total philanthropic support, and that’s based on what Del Rosso described as a broader conception of peace and security.
Moreover, major grantmakers in the space have been pulling out, with few new ones arriving to replace them. One of the most recent to pull up stakes is the MacArthur Foundation, which is winding down its nuclear security funding after 40 years in the field. An awkward decision to be sure, in light of Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling last month.
In a 2020 evaluation of its nuclear security work (which it had characterized as one of its “big bets”), MacArthur cited progress made, but concluded that “there is not a clear line of sight to the existing theory of change’s intermediate and long-term outcomes in the Big Bet timeframe.” For our coverage this February, Valerie Chang, who led MacArthur’s Nuclear Challenges team and will depart the foundation in June, confirmed that reasoning, telling us that data indicated no clear path to goals originally envisioned.
MacArthur’s nuclear drawdown is one recent example of how global peace and security work often doesn’t fit neatly within grantmaker conceptions of measurable impact and defined goals. It’s a disconnect that has eaten into philanthropic support over the past 10 to 15 years.
Del Rosso and Heintz agreed, referring to the sector as a whole. “The fact is, it’s very difficult to prove that you’ve had substantive success in areas where you can’t solve the conflicts, but you can manage them. And conflict is going to be inherent in international relations,” Del Rosso said.
Heintz invoked a quote often attributed to Albert Einstein: “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” But he also said that, broadly speaking, the tyranny of metrics has waned over the past several years, with grantmakers coming to appreciate qualitative as well as quantitative forms of evaluation.
More often, diminished philanthropic attention to peace and security is attributed to the end of the Cold War and the brief “unipolar moment” of unchallenged U.S. predominance on the world stage. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the inability of the U.S.-led system to stop it is only the latest indication that that moment has passed. In its place is a multipolar world in which the U.S. no longer enjoys the vantage point it held following both World War II and the Cold War.
Who will step up?
The pressing question right now is whether the Ukraine crisis will alert the philanthrosphere to that fact and prompt some sort of much-needed ramp-up in peace and security funding.
There’s a case for pessimism and a case for optimism. On the one hand, we’ve already seen how much philanthropic attention has gone, rightly, toward humanitarian relief in the region. Following the conflict, major support will likely continue to flow to support rebuilding. But after that, will U.S. funders have enough gas left in the tank to address the more fraught question of keeping the peace?
Heintz voiced some doubts. “I worry a bit that there won’t be bandwidth and resources available to step back from the crisis and say, ‘What does this crisis reveal to us? And how do we need to challenge assumptions, redefine priorities, think about new systems, perhaps new institutions?’”
Part of the issue is a lack of modern-day David Rockefellers. Many of the top philanthropic funders of peace and security work are legacy grantmakers like the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the MacArthur Foundation. What’s lacking is a new crop of major living donors willing to commit to this work over the long haul. That absence is a problem as the influence of super-rich living donors continues to grow and the relative heft of yesteryear’s powerhouse foundations declines.
Whether Ukraine will prompt some new David Rockefeller, or even some new George Soros, to enter the field is anybody’s guess. But so far, no such figure has emerged.
There is, however, a case for cautious optimism that new philanthropic support for peacebuilding will materialize. That case has everything to do with the vast differences between the world of 1945 and the world of 2022.
“It’s a much more variegated, complicated set of challenges,” Del Rosso said. “And you can’t, in my view, separate the Global South from great power competition, because they’re all inextricably connected. Climate change is a good example — how it’s affecting everyone.” As U.S.-centric and Eurocentric assumptions fade and the extent of global interconnectivity becomes clearer, he went on, the definition of what counts as “peacebuilding” is encompassing more things.
Grantmakers with little appetite for traditional peacebuilding and the old U.S.-led order may get on board if opportunities emerge to weave peacebuilding into efforts around global health and development (i.e., equitable COVID vaccination), climate and environment, female empowerment, and grassroots movement-building in the Global South.
“I think there is much less consensus now on the proper role of, not only the United States, but of this liberal international order. And I think there will be some serious thought about what needs to be preserved, what needs to be no longer preserved, what needs to be reformed,” Del Rosso said.
“It’s not only about Russia and China, it’s also about the rest of the Global South, it’s about Africa,” Heintz said. “It’s about South Asia, it’s about Latin America, and how do we more fully integrate them into a global system that is inclusive and fair and transparent, and, you know, effective?”
A multipolar world
It’s still far too early to tell whether such a new global system will be workable, and in light of Ukraine, what role authoritarian powers like Russia and China might play in it.
But even at this early stage, the crisis is affecting grantmakers’ strategies. “As facts on the ground change, we are evaluating our response to the war in Ukraine,” said MacArthur Foundation President John Palfrey in a statement to Inside Philanthropy. “MacArthur is a longstanding peace and security funder,” he went on, citing potential funding avenues including humanitarian response, Ukrainian civil society, journalism, and migration and immigration efforts. “And we are providing modest additional support for nuclear grantees that offer key policy research and analysis, and support critical dialogues,” he said.
As funders consider their approaches, backing the bread-and-butter of peacebuilding — things like research, institution-building, policy expertise, and, where possible, bottom-up peace activism — will remain vital. So will efforts to fund cross-border dialogue that exists alongside and complementary to official diplomatic engagement.
But even though the U.S. harbors a lot of philanthropic horsepower, to be effective, such an outward stance may have to be humbler and a lot less U.S.-centric than it was in the 20th century.
Speaking about the post-Cold War unipolar moment, Heintz said, “We in the West, in particular, we in the United States, did not proactively think about how the world was changing to a much more interdependent kind of reality.… We should have used that unipolar moment of great American strength to create a multipolar global system that distributed power and managed power in constructive ways to solve global problems.”
“If we had done that,” he went on, “we might have been in a very different place today. But instead, we chose to try to manage the unipolar moment in a way that would extend American global dominance. I think that was the fundamental mistake.”