June 26, 2026
We're proud to celebrate that SCARP PhD student Hayfaa Abou Ibrahim has been awarded the Fox International Fellowship for the year 2026-27.
She will soon be moving to New Haven as a Visiting Scholar in Research at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University.
What Hayfaa will pursue in her fellowship
In Hayfaa's words:
When disasters strike, we tend to imagine them arriving one at a time: an earthquake, a flood, an explosion, or a political or economic crisis. But for many communities around the world, crises don’t wait for their turn; They come all at once and collide in multiple ways and forms in what has been termed "polycrises”. The primary objective of my research is to understand how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) collaborate in polycrisis contexts and how disaster policies define — and vary — their roles across different institutional settings and contexts.
This research grows out of lived experience. Over the past years, I have been directly affected by the crises I study, particularly the Beirut Port Blast. Experiencing its aftermath and witnessing NGOs mobilize amid state dysfunction piqued my interest in how NGOs collaborate in fragile contexts. My interest deepened as I followed the devastating 2023 earthquakes in Türkiye and observed that NGOs still played a central role in response despite a strong, centralized state. This heightened my interest in comparing the two cases. I center my positionality as someone directly impacted by crises and as a researcher with a grounded perspective. This dual standpoint shapes my understanding of urgency and the imperative to produce responsive and publicly relevant research.
This research also comes at a critical moment marked by the retraction of USAID and the restructuring of the humanitarian sector globally - dynamics that many of my interviewees describe as already reshaping priorities, partnerships, and the capacity to respond to crises. These shifts will shape future public policy debates over who holds responsibility and authority in disaster response and how to build accountable and equitable coordination under conditions of scarcity.
Through fieldwork in earthquake-affected southeastern Türkiye and post-blast Beirut, I've been sitting with professionals from NGOs and UN agencies to understand how they collaborate to provide essential urban services.
I’m thrilled to be heading to Yale as a Fox International Fellow for 2026-27, and deeply grateful to my supervisor, Michael Hooper, my colleagues, and professors at SCARP for the support that made this possible. The next year will be a meaningful turning point in my PhD journey as I move to the final stage of data analysis and writing. This Fellowship will also give me a chance to think more carefully about what I’ve witnessed in the field, and to ask harder questions alongside scholars who are grappling with the world’s most urgent challenges.
At Yale, I hope to deepen the comparative and theoretical dimensions of this work by engaging with one of the world's leading centers for international and area studies. I hope this research reaches beyond academia and helps policymakers and humanitarian organizations design more adaptive and collaborative disaster frameworks.
Read the Fox Fellowship's statement about Hayfaa
More about Hayfaa Abou Ibrahim
Hayfaa Abou Ibrahim's research
is deeply interested in how different planning actors shape the urban and spatial production of space, particularly in fragile and contested contexts. Hayfaa seeks to understand how NGOs, increasingly important actors in providing shelter and essential urban services after crises, tackle the challenge of post-disaster collaboration.
Hayfaa Bou Ibrahim's interview about being a Public Scholar at UBC
[My PhD research and education] is both a scholarly path and a personal commitment to my country and to other places facing similar, overlapping crises.
Congratulations Hayfaa! We'll be sorry to see you depart Vancouver but excited for your research and your adventure to come.