A Conversation with Chiara Ruffa

Ruffa discusses the impact of civil-military interactions on conflict arenas

How did you become interested in international relations?

I think it all started in high school.  I was always reading international newspapers and trying to be up to date on what was going on in the world.  And I actually wanted to become a doctor and being part of the Doctors without Borders organizations.  And then I some point realized I couldn’t be a doctor because I was too scared to do surgeries and this kind of stuff so I decided maybe studying humanitarian emergencies and peace interventions and the interaction local population and the intervening actors could be something that I would be very interested in doing.

How has your varied field work influenced your perspectives when conducting academic research? Any particular experiences influenced you more than others?

Definitely doing a lot of field work has helped to clarify what my actual academic interests were. I think that I’ve been particularly influenced by my field work in Afghanistan.  Having spent a substantial amount of time both embedded with an NGO in Kabul in Afghanistan and with the military, I feel like it’s really changed the argument I was trying to put forward in my PhD thesis and my actual understanding of this kind of international effort to reconstruct an account that is completely different.  I have lived a lot in war torn countries.  I lived in Lebanon, in the Central African Republic but I think that Afghanistan has changed me profoundly and has really taught me how we should actually all be much more respectful of local ownership and what the actual local population wants to achieve.

Your current work focuses on the cooperation between NGOs and armies in complex humanitarian emergencies.  What particular cases are you studying and why?

This is part of our broader project that we are putting together with another International Security Program research fellow.  The current cases we are looking at are Iraq, Sudan and Afghanistan.  We have chosen the three cases because the three of them are complex humanitarian emergencies but they have a different involvement of the international community and in particular they display different patterns of civil-military interaction.  I mean, in Sudan the interaction between humanitarian and military actors is relatively simple, it is much more complex in Afghanistan, and it has been quite problematic in Iraq.  I am personally going to focus on the Afghanistan case.

In what ways has being at the Belfer Center contributed to your research?

Being at the Belfer Center has been an outstanding source of information and learning and intellectual stimulation.  The great resources of the Belfer Center are the fellows.  They have been an endless source of inspiration, motivation for me.  The communication of fellows and the faculty is a very nice environment to work in and very stimulating.