Re-Setting the Humanitarian System through Humanitarian Studies

Authors/Contributions from: Adriana Stibral, Thea Hilhorst, Palash Kamruzzaman, Mihir R. Bhatt, Khayal Trivedi

At a time when the global humanitarian system is under extraordinary strain, the HOISA’s panel discussion on “Status of Humanitarian Studies: A View and Beyond” brought together leading voices to reflect on the future of the field. Speakers included Dr. Adriana A. Stibral (Charles Darwin University), Professor Palash Kamruzzaman (University of South Wales), Professor Dorothea Hilhorst (Hague Humanitarian Studies Centre), and Mihir R. Bhatt (All India Disaster Mitigation Institute, AIDMI). Their collective reflections offer an important alternative perspective for HNPW 2026, GENEVA on re-setting the humanitarian system through Humanitarian studies. Over 100 scholars, students, scientists and donors joined.

From Expansion to Interrogation

Dr. Adriana A. Stibral’s research traced the rapid expansion in the recent decades of Humanitarian Studies (HS), particularly visible in the Global North. Her research shows that this emerging academic field has contributed significant value by providing specialized education and generating research that can inform humanitarian policy and practice. However, Stibral’s research also highlights key limitations, for instance, the field remains concentrated in the Global North, which creates access barriers and could reinforce power imbalances in knowledge production and dissemination. Drawing from extensive interviews with humanitarian thought leaders, Stibral  underscored the urgent needfor greater access, more diverse and context-sensitive curricula, and research that better bridges academic insights with real-world humanitarian challenges.

Professor Palash Kamruzzaman provoked the debate further, raising difficult questions about hegemony, donor influence, and the political economy shaping humanitarian knowledge. He warned that humanitarian studies risks becoming aligned with “donor speak,” where funding priorities determine research agendas and acceptable narratives limiting the studies and humanitarian actions, both. His intervention called for courage—asking whether the field can truly interrogate structural drivers of crisis such as war economies, climate injustice, and global capitalism.

Humanitarian Studies as a Site of Resistance

Professor Dorothea Hilhorst reframed the discussion by challenging the idea that humanitarian studies should primarily analyse the international humanitarian system. Instead, she argued that the field must focus on societies and vulnerable communities experiencing crisis. For her, humanitarian studies should become a “site of resistance”—a space of genuine collaboration across North and South that foregrounds justice, solidarity, and structural accountability rather than merely optimising aid delivery.

This sets the stage for recommendations and way ahead for Humanitarian Studies. Recommendations included decolonising and diversifying humanitarian studies, strengthening scholarship–practice linkages, clarifying scope through interdisciplinarity, confronting power and political economy, diversifying funding, and expanding equitable access through flexible learning pathways.

Inhumanity within Humanitarianism

Mihir R. Bhatt added a powerful self - reflective dimension, questioning whether there is an “inhumanity” embedded within humanitarian studies itself that he has been a part of. Drawing from lived experiences of extreme heat-affected workers, displaced populations, and crisis-affected communities, he argued that invisibility in research becomes invisibility in policy and soon in performance. Structural neglect, prolonged waiting, and selective attention are not accidental—they are products of dominant narratives and funding architectures.

He posed a provocative question: Why is nonviolence not explicitly embedded as a humanitarian value? If forced migration due to climate or conflict is itself a form of structural violence, then humanitarian studies must move beyond response analysis toward reducing reasons for humanitarian crisis

Beyond Reset: Toward Humanitarian Justice

For HNPW 2026, GENEVA, the message from HOISA is clear: re-setting the humanitarian system cannot be limited to technical reform. It requires ethical re-orientation. Humanitarian Studies must democratise knowledge, embed practice, confront structural inequalities, and amplify lived realities. The future of the field lies not in professionalising humanitarianism alone, but in transforming it to aim to reduce causes of humanitarian crisis. And the responsibility of achieving this, lies with not just the key individuals who are driving this field forward but also with the students and incoming researchers who must not compromise on these principles and make humanitarian studies as their site of resistance. Humanitarian studies is an important tool and a lens that reads humanitarian sector, observes, critiques and pushes it to improve, and therefore is action oriented. We need to institutionalize these principles across all regions.

HOISA, in its position as an observatory will continue to share these learnings with other observatories, as well as the humanitarian studies network that exists in India and South Asia, to push them towards a veritable mechanism that promotes humanitarian justice.