Professor Dorothea (Thea) Hilhorst is Professor of Humanitarian Studies at the International Institute for Social Studies of Erasmus University in The Hague. In 2022, Prof Hilhorst was awarded the Spinoza Prize, one of the most notable Dutch awards in science. From this award, she is currently establishing a Humanitarian Studies Centre (HSC) based at the ISS. Prof Hilhorst’s work has a focus on aid-society relations: studying how aid is embedded in the context, impacts on governments and society, and is shaped by the manifold actions of actors in and around programmes for protection, service delivery and capacity development. She has a special interest in the intersections of humanitarianism with development, peacebuilding and gender-relations.
Prof Hilhorst’s research programmes have taken place in settings affected by disaster, conflict and fragility, including Afghanistan, Angola, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Rwanda, South Sudan, and Sri Lanka. Currently, her main research programme concerns humanitarian governance: accountability, advocacy and alternatives. Prof Hilhorst also recently completer a programme on when ‘conflict meets disaster’, that studied disaster governance in high-conflict, low-conflict and post-conflict societies.
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