Prof. Elizabeth Ferris

Bio

Elizabeth Ferris is Research Professor with the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University. In 2016, she also served as Senior Advisor to the UN General Assembly’s Summit for Refugees and Migrants in New York.  Prior to joining Georgetown, she was a Senior Fellow and co-director of the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement and spent 20 years working in the field of humanitarian assistance, most recently in Geneva, Switzerland at the World Council of Churches.  She has written extensively on humanitarian issues, including Consequences of Chaos: Syria’s Humanitarian Crisis and the Failure to Protect, with Kemal Kirsici (Brookings Institution Press, 2016).  Her latest book – Refugees, Migration and Global Governance: Negotiating the Global Compacts (with Katharine Donato) will be published in July 2019. 

Elizabeth Ferris has carried out research on a wide range of issues related to internal displacement, including a comparative analysis of policies toward IDPs (From Responsibility to Response; Assessing National Approaches to Internal Displacement, with Erin Mooney and Chareen Stark, Brookings 2011), institutional response to IDPs (Ten Years after Humanitarian Reform: how have IDPs fared?  Brookings 2014); displacement in Iraq (Access to Durable  Solutions among IDPs in Iraq, IOM 2017). She has also carried out research on environmental displacement with a particular focus on planned relocation.