Christopher Ward is a postgraduate researcher at IDS. A political scientist, Christopher focuses on informality and informal settlements, forced displacement, and the political economy of aid, with a particular focus on urban contexts within crisis-affected states. His dissertation at IDS examines the effects of humanitarian aid on formal and informal governance in Haiti’s volatile urban slums.

Over the past 15+ years, he has worked across relief, recovery and reconstruction efforts in multiple post-disaster and post-crisis contexts, including Sudan, Haiti, Burkina Faso, Iraq, Nepal, Micronesia, Mali, Niger, and Senegal, and has significant institutional experience with USAID, the EU, the World Bank, and the UN.

Chris holds a master’s degree in International Affairs from The George Washington University (USA), and an undergraduate degree in Political Science and Spanish from the University of Iowa (USA). He was also a US Fulbright Program Research Fellow in Turkey, affiliated with Bogaziçi University’s Department of Political Science.

Chris’s thesis title is ‘Saving lives, harming institutions? Assessing Effects of Humanitarian Aid on State-Society Relations in Haitian Informal Settlements’ and he is supervised by Dolf te Lintelo and Marina Apgar.