del Valle

Hernan del Valle has led humanitarian aid operations for the past 15 years. His work has taken him across five continents assisting people affected by armed conflict and forced displacement. He has been Head of Advocacy and Communications for Medecins Sans Frontieres, where he grappled with the challenge of defending a space for neutral and impartial provision of humanitarian aid in highly polarized contexts like Syria or Myanmar.

He has been recently appointed Rita E. Hauser Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. His current work documents the challenges for humanitarian aid agencies running rescue operations in the Mediterranean Sea and assisting refugees and migrants marginalized by state policy. It explores the fundamental questions that emerge around borders, exclusion, solidarity, nationalism, and fundamental rights within a Europe bitterly divided by debates on identity and migration.

Del Valle is a lawyer who specialized in international law and human rights at the University of Buenos Aires, in Argentina. He holds a master’s degree in politics of development from the London School of Economics and Political Science and has conducted work in forced migration at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in South Africa. He has been a guest speaker on the politics of aid and forced migration at Boston University, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Oxford, the University of Tokyo, and the University of Vienna.