Dr Philip Proudfoot is an experienced researcher with deep expertise in humanitarianism, conflict, and development, with over a decade of field-based and policy-focused work in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and beyond.
Philip’s research is grounded in the Arabic-speaking world, with a strong empirical and theoretical interest in economic inequality; forced migration; protracted conflict; protection, including Social Protection, and the humanitarian-development-peace (HDP) nexus.
His work engages critically with dominant humanitarian approaches, drawing on participatory and ethnographic methods to foreground the experiences and political agency of affected communities. He also works on the political sociology of aid, with a particular emphasis on the everyday politics of social protection, labour, and displacement.
At IDS, Philip had led and contributed to a range of research and evaluation projects for major international organisations, including the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), International Labour Organization (ILO), United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), World Food Programme (WFP), InterAction, Save the Children, and the Norwegian Refugee Council. His work has directly informed global policy conversations on localisation, accountability, and humanitarian learning.
Notably, Philip contributed to the UN’s Inter-Agency Humanitarian Evaluation (IAHE) of the Yemen response—the first independent evaluation of a $16 billion multilateral humanitarian operation. He also led a high-level evaluation of the ILO’s efforts to support post-conflict economic recovery in Iraq and Yemen. His current projects include co-leading a participatory protection evaluation for the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC). He also served on the learning team for OCHA’s flagship imitative, where he is developed new tools and frameworks for community-led knowledge production.
Philip also maintains an interest in (combating) rising impunity. He is the founder of The Accountability Archive (TAA), a major digital research initiative that documents and analyses public statements that justify, deny, or incite violations of international humanitarian law (IHL). With over 80,000 crowdsourced entries, TAA is the world’s largest archive of its kind. It is designed as both a critical research tool and a public resource—supporting efforts to challenge impunity by transforming digital speech into durable, searchable evidence.
Alongside his applied and policy work, Philip has a strong academic background in political ethnography and the anthropology of conflict. He is the author of Rebel Populism (Manchester University Press, 2022), an ethnographic study of Syrian migrant workers in Lebanon. The book explores how experiences of precarity and exclusion gave rise to distinctive forms of political aspiration and unrest, linking everyday struggles to broader theories of populism and rebellion.
Philip is currently writing a second book, under contract with Polity Press, which argues for a more politically radical and activist-oriented humanitarianism. Drawing on case studies from Gaza, Syria, and Yemen, the book critically assesses how impunity is reshaping the global humanitarian system—and what it would take to reclaim humanitarian action as an expression of solidarity and resistance.
He has held academic appointments as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Bath and as Assistant Director of the British Institute in Amman, under the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL). In his earlier British Academy-funded research, he examined activist-led assistance networks, conceptualising humanitarianism not just as a technocratic endeavour, but as a form of social movement rooted in mutual aid and collective care. Philip is currently Principal Investigator on a second British Academy-funded project that explores the politics of gender backlash in Lebanon and Palestine, and de-NGOization, with a focus on how anti-feminist discourses are being mobilised in contexts of authoritarianism, economic crisis, and war.
