On Friday 6 February the International Humanitarian Studies Association has been launched during the world conference of humanitarian studies in the city of Groningen, Netherlands. This conference, the first World Conference of Humanitarian Studies, was organized by the Universities of Bochum, Groningen and Wageningen and attended by 500 scholars and practitioners from the whole world.
IHSA will create a network of people engaged in humanitarian studies regardless of their ideological opinion, school of thought, scientific discipline or origins. The IHSA equally welcomes academic scholars, consultants, policy researchers, and reflective practitioners among its membership.
IHSA will be hosted by Disaster Studies at Wageningen University, the Netherlands
The launch of IHSA testifies to the growing field of humanitarian studies. Humanitarian crises caused by conflict, natural disaster or political failure have increasingly become the subject of a range of disciplines, including international relations, international law, development studies, anthropology, conflict studies, and migration studies. Yet, there is no venue where these scholarly communities meet and debate their different insights and understanding of humanitarian crises, in dialogue with policy actors and implementing agencies.
Humanitarian studies is much more than the study of humanitarian action. Its field is concerned with how humanitarian crises evolve from societies and in turn how they affect societies. This includes, amongst others international dimensions of crisis, their causes, dynamics and effects, response programmes and experiences of refugees and internally displaced people.
An important role of IHSA is to maintain the momentum of this conference and ensure its follow-up. Tufts University has announced it will host the next World Conference of Humanitarian Studies in June 2011 together with Harvard and Columbia universities. The IHSA will further be engaged in the promotion of research and the preparation of publications.
President: Alex de Waal, Program Director at the Social Science Research Council, New York, and fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative
General Secretary: Dorothea Hilhorst, Professor of Humanitarian Aid and Reconstruction, Wageningen, the Netherlands
Board Members (in alphabetical order):
Yasemin Aysan, Consultant; Risk Management and Recovery Planning; Turkey;
Mihir Bhatt, Director Disaster Mitigation Institute, Gujarat;
Ian Christoplos, Researcher Swedish University for Agricultural Sciences (SLU); humanitarian consultant;
Dennis Dijkzeul, professor in the management of humanitarian crisis, Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany;
Virginia Acosta Garcia, Director CIESAS, Mexico;
Paul Harvey, consultant Humanitarian Outcomes, editor of the international journal of Disasters;
Peter Walker, Director Feinstein International Center, Tufts University, Boston, USA.