War, peace, and cake: the world in 2025

As conflict escalates, international institutions and agreements are being pulled down Keystone

So far, 2025 has been a year of conflict, upheaval, and huge challenges to the international system.

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In the latest edition of the SWI Swissinfo.ch Inside Geneva podcast, Imogen Foulkes spoke to journalists covering global conflicts.

“It all started downhill from 20th of January. Since then, it’s just, well, ‘the Ukraine war will be over in 24 hours?’ Nothing happened. It just got worse. Then we had Gaza, then we have Iran, Israel. Then we had the cuts of all the aid,” said Gunilla von Hall, foreign correspondent of the Svenskadagbladet Swedish newspaper.

“It’s very bleak. I think we should just not give up our hope, but it looks really… We have four years,” she added.

The humanitarian work in Geneva has been decimated.

“What is disturbing is the very casual destruction of international institutions and agreements that have been pulled together over many years, decades of works since World War II, and which for all their many imperfections are trying, with some cases significant success, to address the critical challenges that the world faces,” said Nick Cumming-Bruce, a New York Times contributor.

Is everything bleak? Or can we find some hope somewhere?

“These are hard times and people I think are very anxious at the moment. Maybe we should still pay tribute, hat tip, to the humanitarian work that comes out of Geneva. People who, they don’t live peacefully here in this quiet city. They are in Gaza, they are in Sudan, they are in Afghanistan,” said Imogen Foulkes, host of Inside Geneva.

Listen to the Inside Geneva podcast for a review of the first six months of a momentous year.