Protection in the Digital Age: Trust and Technology in Local Humanitarian Action

With Muzna Dureid

This project explores how local humanitarian actors adapt to conflict in both physical and digital spaces, focusing on the White Helmets in Syria. It examines the organization’s evolution as a protection actor, its use of digital technologies such as early warning systems and blockchain, and the ways trust and legitimacy are built—or undermined—in the face of disinformation and contested authority. Drawing on field research and organizational analysis, the study traces how trust is cultivated internally among members, horizontally with local communities, and vertically with international partners and publics. Theoretically, the project develops a new framework for understanding digital trust as a core dimension of humanitarian legitimacy, showing how technology reshapes protective agency and reconfigures the politics of civilian protection in the 21st century.

Advancing Humility in International Peacemaking and Peacekeeping

Funded by the John Templeton Foundation (2025–2027)

The United Nations faces a critical challenge: its legitimacy is eroding where it is most needed. Protests against peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the expulsion of missions from Mali and Sudan reveal mounting frustrations with UN operations. Critics view the organization as hindered by liberal hubris and Western bias—imposing top-down solutions, dismissing local agency, and failing to adapt to evolving conflicts. In response, the UN took a significant step in 2021 by adopting humility as a core value, alongside humanity, integrity, and inclusion. But what does it really mean for a vast and complex institution to embody humility? And how can this value be practically applied in high-stakes, cross-cultural contexts like peacemaking and peacekeeping?

This project tackles these questions to explore how humility can shape relationships, foster trust, and enhance the legitimacy of UN operations. Phase 1 investigates the evolution and adoption of humility within the UN as a whole, while Phase 2 focuses on its practical application in two challenging missions—South Sudan and the DR Congo. Through document analysis, interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork, this project studies humility as both an internal organizational value influencing staff interactions and decision-making processes, and an external-facing value shaping engagements with states, warring parties, and local populations. By reimagining humility as a practical and relational value, this project offers a model for more adaptive UN engagement and opens new avenues to apply humility across international institutions for more effective, equitable global governance.

We Save Us: Grassroots Protection and Polarization in the United States

Funded in part by the Healthy, Equitable, and Responsive Democracy (HEARD) Initiative

This project advances theory on grassroots protection by bringing insights from international research on civilian self-protection into the U.S. context, developing new conceptual tools to analyze how communities respond collectively when institutional protection fails. It extends theories of mutual aid, civil society resilience, and political polarization by examining how partisan identities shape both the organization and framing of local protection efforts, refining existing models of polarization to account for bottom-up practices of care and survival as well as electoral and institutional conflict. The study complicates prevailing accounts of polarization by highlighting how grassroots action can simultaneously reproduce divides and generate unexpected cross-partisan solidarities. Seen in comparative perspective, the project situates U.S. polarization within global patterns of institutional fragility and elaborates a theory of democratic resilience that foregrounds community-led protection as a distinctly political practice rather than a purely humanitarian response.