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IHSA Board Elections 2025 – Information for IHSA Members

Between October and December 2025, the IHSA board was partially renewed, with 4 Board members’ terms coming to an end. We were pleased to see 14 candidates running for the 4 available seats. We consider this as an important sign of the livelihood and participation of our organization, and a great sign of an involved membership! For this reason we want to express publicly our gratitude to the 14 candidates:

Dennis King, Bethlehem Mengistu, Vladislav Kavaleuski, Thomas Bamforth, Julia Steets, Selman Salim Kesgin, Jessica Alexander, Flora Cohen, Rafael van den Bergh, Adriana Stibral, Nazanin Zadeh-Cummings, Amra Lee, and Patrick Milabyo Kyamusugulwa

Thank you to all of the candidates for your commitment and interest in IHSA. We would also like to thank all the IHSA members that cast their vote. We received 276 votes in total (each member could cast up to 4 votes). The results of the election confirmed a further mandate for 2 board members that had finished their first term, Nazanin Zadeh-Cummings and Patrick Milabyo Kyamusugulwa. Additionally, we’re delighted to welcome Bethlehem Mengistu and Selman Salim Kesgin to the board.

Our warmest congratulations go to them, we look forward to work together to strengthen IHSA and make it every day a more diverse, participatory and representative organization, able to engage its members and to build bridges between humanitarian studies and practice.

As we start a new cycle, and we hope that these important signs of engagement will be continued in the coming years. As a board, we are striving to increase opportunities to engage members. In the past two years we have created 2 important activities: the annual lecture and the thesis prize for Master’s students. More will come soon and we hope you will all be willing to contribute! If you have any ideas for new initiatives, working groups, events, or partnerships, please reach out to us via info@ihsa.info

Finally, a note of transparency: we decided not to include exact numbers on votes per candidate, but if any candidate would like to know how they performed, they can reach out to info@ihsa.info for their exact vote total, and the number of votes needed for election.

About Us

The International Humanitarian Studies Association is a network engaged with the study of humanitarian crises caused by disaster, conflict or political instability. Humanitarian studies concern how humanitarian crises evolve, how they affect people and their institutions, communities and societies, and the responses they trigger.

We form a platform for the different disciplines that address humanitarian studies. It offers a venue where these scholarly communities can meet and debate their different insights and understanding of humanitarian crises, in dialogue with policy actors and implementing agencies. IHSA equally welcomes academic scholars, consultants, policy researchers, and reflective practitioners among its membership.

If you are not a member already, please join us today! If you want to find out more about IHSA Governance and how we function please have a look at our Governance page.

Relevant resources

As a part of our efforts to connect the actors in the humanitarian sector, we have created a selection of humanitarian resources for our community.

This selection includes a wide variety of topics and resources like:

Membership

IHSA offers two types of membership. Individual membership and institutional membership. We equally welcome academic scholars, consultants, policy researchers, and reflective practitioners among our membership. Do you think your institution might be interested in joining IHSA please send us an email. More information about institutional membership can be found here.

The individual membership fee is 25 Euro per year. You can fill in the membership registration form to become a member.

Members: