Disaster Resilience Webinar

Mark Thursday 3 March 2022 in your calendar! Together with our research group Disaster Resilience we are organizing a webinar entitled: 'The political dimensions of disasters and disaster management policies'. Dr. Clara Egger will talk about the effects of disasters and disasters management policies on politics. Her work will be discussed by Hamed Seddighi Khavidak.

What are the political impacts of disasters and disaster management policies? How do political institutions, political culture and leadership influence the type of disaster management policies implemented at home and abroad? How can we ensure that emergency powers do not durably affect democratic governance and human rights? This seminar will present how two ongoing research projects focusing on the management of humanitarian crises by national NGOs in the Global South (NEWCOMERS) and on the response to the Covid-19 crisis in Europe (EXCEPTIUS) shed new light on the political dimensions of disasters and disasters management policies.

Dr. Clara Egger

Dr Clara Egger is an Assistant Professor of Globalization Studies and Humanitarian Action at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Groningen. She is the Director of Studies, EMJMD in International Humanitarian Action. She is also the Secretary General of the NOHA network.Her fields of interest are political economy of crisis and crisis governance, foreign aid, democratization and political violence.

Clara holds an MSc and PhD in political science at the University Grenoble Alpes (Sciences Po Grenoble). Before joining Groningen, she was the Research Lead of the Geneva Center for Humanitarian Studies. She has held teaching and research fellowships at Sciences Po Grenoble, the French Institute for Research on Africa (IFRA), the Friedrich Schiller Universität (Jena, Germany) and the University of Québec at Montréal. Her research has been granted the French Red Cross Award for the best research on humanitarian action (2015) and was shortlisted for the ECPR Jean Blondel Prize, awarded to the best European thesis on politics (2017).

Hamed Seddighi Khavidak

During this event Hamed Seddighi will be the discussant.

Hamed is a last year PhD researcher in a double doctorate program between the University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation Sciences in Tehran, Iran, and the Campus Fryslan of the University of Groningen. He has ten years of experience in executive positions in the Iranian Red Crescent Society (equivalent to the Red Cross) in various fields such as relief, rescue, humanitarian aid, volunteer management, child-friendly spaces, logistics, gender-based violence, and psychosocial support in disasters. During these ten years, he collaborated with various international humanitarian organizations such as UNICEF, ICRC, and the Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Center of the IFRC.

His fields of interest are public health, social welfare, climate-related disasters, child protection in emergencies.

Hamed is also a board member of the EUSARF Academy.