Magnificent Humanity, Diminished Ambition
On Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, the collapse in development funding, and why local agency is now a question of security as much as principle.
Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, addresses how society must collectively preserve human virtues in a time of rapid technological advancement. It is a document aimed principally at the architects of artificial intelligence, but it deserves reading by those of us working in fragile and conflict-affected states. Why? Because the crisis it identifies is not only about technology, but also about where power concentrates, and who gets left out when it does.
The Pope evokes his predecessor Leo XIII, who watched factory workers being uprooted by industrial transformation and concluded the Church could not remain distant. Today, he writes, we find ourselves facing a transformation of similar magnitude, with perhaps even greater consequences. The parallel is instructive. The Industrial Revolution produced enormous wealth and enormous dispossession at the same time. The AI revolution is doing the same, except the consolidation of power is now happening faster, more invisibly, and with far less political accountability than any nineteenth-century factory owner ever had to reckon with.
The encyclical directs the principle of subsidiarity squarely at the technology companies now amassing power over everything and everyone. Their platforms shape information environments, their infrastructure underpins governments, their models make decisions about credit, conflict, and care. This is a legitimate and important critique. But there is a parallel consolidation happening in our own sector that deserves scrutiny.
Total official development assistance from the world’s richest countries fell by almost a quarter in real terms in 2025, the largest annual drop on record. The United States drove roughly three-quarters of the decline. The United Kingdom cut its aid spending from 0.5 per cent of GNI to 0.3 per cent to offset increased defence expenditure, and the tide of cuts has continued across France, Germany, Switzerland, and elsewhere. The political narrative is that development spending was wasteful and captured by ideology. Some of that critique is fair, but the conclusion drawn, that the answer is less investment in fragile states, not better investment, will cost lives and generate instability that no amount of defence spending will contain. The shift is presented as a hard-headed choice between development and security; it is in fact a category error, because stability is not purchased with security spending alone. It is built in the spaces between. And if states are choosing to step back, the question of who steps forward becomes unavoidable. Private wealth has never been more concentrated, and a retreat of public money is precisely the moment when private conviction, deployed with judgement rather than as charity, matters most.
Last week I was in Riga attending the NATO StratCom Dialogue 2026, where the conversation was almost entirely about information operations: AI-generated disinformation, synthetic media, platform manipulation, influence campaigns operating at industrial scale. What struck me most was how often strategic narratives are built around the stories governments assume their people are telling, rather than the ones those people actually tell. That gap, between the audience imagined in a briefing room and the one that actually exists, is exactly where adversarial influence operations find their purchase. And it is a gap no counter-disinformation budget will close if the underlying relationship with local populations is never built. What the conversation tends to miss, and what those of us working in fragile states see clearly, is that communities are not passive recipients of whoever's narrative reaches them first. They are active sense-makers, with existing information ecosystems, trusted local voices, and their own means of judging what is true. The failure to invest in local communications capacity, which the ODA cuts are now accelerating, is not only a development problem. It is a strategic vulnerability. Defunding the institutions that build local information resilience and then spending more to counter disinformation at the platform level is not a strategy. It is a contradiction. The encyclical’s warning about concentrated power applies here with particular force. The document explicitly prohibits delegating irreversible decisions to artificial systems and warns at length about AI’s role in reshaping how war is waged. But its deeper concern is epistemic: who controls what people believe, what they trust, and which narratives shape their understanding of reality. When a handful of platform companies and state actors dominate the information environment, and the international community simultaneously defunds the local institutions that might offer an alternative, populations in fragile states become maximally exposed to manipulation. That is not an abstraction. It is the condition we are operating in now.
The Pope writes that whatever can be carried out by individuals, families, intermediary organisations and local communities should not be carried out by higher-level authorities. This is simply a description of what effective development looks like when it is done honestly and, it turns out, what effective information resilience looks like too. Communities navigating conflict do not lack analysis of their own situation. They lack the resources, the platforms, and the institutional backing to act on what they already know. At ARK, we have built our work on that premise. From Haiti, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Ukraine and beyond, the question we return to is not what we can deliver, but what we can help communities deliver for themselves, in ways that outlast our involvement. That is not an ideological position. Increasingly, it is a security one.
The Pope warns that if human beings are treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy. The development sector, at its worst, has embodied exactly that logic, measuring communities by their deficits rather than their capacities. What this moment demands is not less ambition for the world’s most vulnerable populations, but a different kind: one that treats local agency as the answer to both the security and information crises. The rooms where AI policy is debated and the rooms where aid budgets are cut feel like separate conversations. They are not.