Keynote Speakers

Prof. Gilles Carbonnier, Vice-President, ICRC

Gilles Carbonnier is the vice-president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (appointed in 2018). Dr Carbonnier has over thirty years of experience in humanitarian action, international development and trade. Since 2007, Dr Carbonnier has been a full professor of development economics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva), where he also served as
director of studies and president of the Centre for Education and Research in Humanitarian Action.
His expertise is in international cooperation, war and peace economies, and the nexus between natural resources and development. His latest book is entitled Missing Dollars: Illicit Financial Flows from Commodity Trade (Brill, 2024). In 2016, he released the monograph Humanitarian Economics. War, Disaster and the Global Aid Market with Hurst and Oxford University Press.

Prior to joining the Graduate Institute, Dr Carbonnier worked with the ICRC in Iraq, Ethiopia, El Salvador and Sri Lanka (1989–1991), and served as an economic adviser at the ICRC’s headquarters (1999–2006). Between 1992 and 1996, he was in charge of international trade negotiations (GATT/WTO) and development cooperation programmes for the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs.

Dr. Ghassan Elkahlout

Ghassan Elkahlout is the Director of the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies (CHS) in Doha, Qatar, and an Associate Professor of Conflict Management and Humanitarian Action at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. His work focuses on peacebuilding, humanitarian diplomacy, and mediation, with a particular emphasis on the MENA region and Palestine. He is the Chief Editor of the Journal of Peacebuilding and Development and has contributed to leading academic journals, including Third World Quarterly and the Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction.

He has also edited key volumes such as Gaza’s Cycle of Destruction and Rebuilding and Forced Migration in the Arab World. His Arabic-language book on humanitarian action provides a critical analysis of the sector’s challenges and evolving role in conflict settings. His forthcoming book with Hurst, From Gulf to Global: Qatar’s Rising Role in Conflict Mediation, explores Qatar’s expanding influence in international diplomacy and crisis resolution. Through his work, Dr. Elkahlout remains committed to bridging academic research with policy and practice, contributing to global debates on humanitarian action, mediation, and peacebuilding in conflict zones.

Prof. Heath Cabot

Heath Cabot is an associate  professor of anthropology at University of Bergen and president of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology. Her work has focused on displacement, law, and access to healthcare. Her book manuscript On the Doorstep of Europe: Asylum and Citizenship in Greece (Penn Press, 2023 [2014]) is a full-length ethnography of the asylum procedure in Greece, based on research begun a decade before the “long summer of migration.” She is currently completing a second monograph entitled A Pharmacy in Dark Times: Medicine and the Reinvention of Society in Austerity Greece. She is a PI in the Hera/Chanse funded project, Tic/Toc (“Times in Crisis, Times of Crisis: The Temporalities of Europe in Polycrisis”). As part of this project, she is conducting research in Norway on the “migration” of the Norway Spruce tree into new ecosystems and territories, as a way to engage issues of nativity, mobility, and ecological and climate “crisis.” In addition to producing extensive scholarly and critical writings, she has consulted for NGOs and other civil society groups in Greece, and she has also conducted field research in Italy.