Each year, the Trudeau Centre for Peace, Conflict, and Justice welcomes several PhD Fellows.  Emily Scott joins us for 2016, and is featured in our next Q&A to explain her fascinating research and provide some advice to undergraduate students.  Thanks, Emily!

1. Tell us about yourself.

Emily Scott

I believe that I gain a great deal of insight into the humanitarian world I study because I am both a humanitarian and a scholar. I am a PhD Candidate in the Political Science department at the University of Toronto but have also worked in humanitarianism with organizations like the Canadian International Development Agency’s Afghanistan Task Force, the UNDP in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, the Carter Center in South Sudan, and Doctors Without Borders in Canada. Where humanitarian intervention is poorly adapted, fails, or never arrives, my humanitarian self feels outrage and my academic self asks why. I came to my PhD with questions I wanted answered and puzzles I wanted to solve.

2. What is your thesis on?

I study why, in response to recognized humanitarian need, we sometimes see the range of interventions offered by international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) expanding and at other times see INGOs choose not to intervene. My focus is on interventions in response to refugee health needs after the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War in 2011

3. How does it connect to PCJ?

My research offers insights into the role of non-state actors in human security, humanitarian intervention, and governance during conflict and fragile peace. The Trudeau Centre for Peace, Conflict, and Justice brings together a community of scholars who understand that non-state actors increasingly govern vulnerable populations and that efforts to enforce state security can put these populations at risk. INGOs are powerful actors in health governance where we have failing or fragile states and where there is conflict.

4. What’s the most interesting fact you’ve uncovered during your research?

War wounds are deep and bloody. But, a surgery to repair a person after an explosion or a gunshot wound is violent too. The wound is made bigger, the tissue is further cut, and the surgeon must go deeper than a piece of shrapnel or a bullet. Being left without care can be less painful but there isn’t much dignity in it.

5. What advice would you give yourself if you could go back in time to your undergraduate years?

Apply to scholarships, become part of a community of intellectuals, and quit one of your three jobs. If it is hard for you to pay for your undergraduate degree, remember that there is more support out there than you think. Go and find it. You can be more free to learn and grow if you ask for help.

6. How did you spend the summer?

I lived and conducted my research in Lebanon and Jordan, spending time observing the interventions of INGOs such as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (ICRC), and Save the Children. I observed interveners at work in hospitals, primary healthcare centres, operating theatres, refugee camps, informal tented settlements, and unfinished buildings.