Fiona Terry is Head of the Centre for Operational Research at International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. She is a scholar-practitioner with over three decades of field- and management-experience in humanitarian affairs, including assignments for Médecins Sans Frontières, the ICRC and UNHCR in Iraq, Somalia, Rwanda, Liberia, Sudan, Myanmar, Nepal, Afghanistan and Tanzania.
Terry has a Ph.D. in International Relations from the ANU and has made significant scholarly contributions to understanding humanitarian policies and politics. Her book Condemned to Repeat: The Paradox of Humanitarian Action (Cornell University Press, 2002) won the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order and remains highly cited. An outline of Terry’s recent theory-practice engagement can be seen in an interview that appeared in 2020 in Violence: An International Journal as “Fiona Terry of the International Committee of the Red Cross talks about The Roots of Restraint in War and the intersection of research and humanitarianism,” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2633002419899796.
Terry’s involvement with UQ takes place through POLSIS’ Visual Politics Research Program. She is a Partner Investigator in a multidisciplinary project on “Visualising Humanitarian Crises: Transforming Images and Aid Policy” that is led by Prof Roland Bleiker and funded by a Linkage Grant from the Australian Research Council (2022-25). Terry coordinates the project’s collaboration with the International Committee of the Red Cross and is centrally involved in the applying the project’s theoretical and empirical insights to policy communities and to real-life dilemmas in humanitarian affairs.