Home The CentreLatest news and insights The Role of Academic Research in the Humanitarian Sector

Universities provide essential resources to understand humanitarian responses, humanitarian leadership and the importance of long-term institutional capacity.

With more than 400 humanitarian events around the world affecting tens of millions of people, there’s enormous demand for humanitarian response. Aid is scarce, need is significant. How do we justify the expenditure of humanitarian aid and expenditure on academic research?

We invited a panel of leading scholars in the humanitarian space from Deakin University, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, Fiji National University, and the University of the Philippines to discuss the role of academic research in the aid sector, the different humanitarian perspectives from the Pacific and North America, the politics of humanitarianism in the rise of populism, and how academic research relates to practitioners – how do you overcome the gap and why should we?

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