Humanitarian Studies Trailblazer and 2022 Spinoza Prize Recipient Professor Thea Hilhorst

Winning the "Dutch Nobel Prize" 

The NWO Spinoza Prize is often referred to as the "Dutch Nobel Prize" because it is the highest scientific award in the Netherlands. The winners conduct outstanding and ground-breaking research with broad impact. They are considered to belong among the best researchers worldwide. Prof. Hilhorst not only meets those criteria but exceeds them, and she's been recognised by the judges as a trailblazer in humanitarian studies. For her, the significance is even more profound as "it also means that they recognise humanitarian studies, as a scientific field," one that didn't exist when she began her academic career.

Although Thea Hilhorst is most often associated with her work in humanitarian aid, she notes that the "starting point of my work is always the society where crisis happens and the people who are affected by the crisis. It is important that we understand better what happens in societies when they are undergoing a humanitarian crisis, the mechanisms, the patterns that happen there. So, most of my research is about how people cope, what people do. But it's also what happens in those societies, how they change, for example, because crisis comes with accelerated paces of change. And one of the big misunderstandings is that things stop when there's a crisis, but that's not true. Things continue. But they alter and change." 

Her early academic career

One might presume that to reach the level of an internationally-acclaimed researcher, Thea Hilhorst followed the traditional academic route, but that would be an incorrect presumption.

After completing her master's degree, Thea Hilhorst was offered a PhD position which she turned down: "I honestly felt like, who am I? What am I going to study if I haven't seen the world, the real world yet?" She spent the next few years working for a development organization and as an applied researcher looking into health and safety issues for mineworkers. When she found a job for three years in the Philippines as a researcher for an NGO, she saw an opportunity to combine this with a PhD. When she was back in the Netherlands to write the PhD, she became part-time lecturer in disaster studies which was perfect to do alongside her PhD studies. Following her PhD, Thea Hilhorst became a full-time researcher, focused on international assistance during humanitarian crises.

It might be difficult to imagine today, but in the early days of her academic career, the assumption was that "societies and institutions stop functioning" during a conflict or disaster. She recalls an example she cited in her 2007 inaugural lecture at Wageningen University about development agencies ceasing services at the start of a conflict, assuming that only emergency aid was still feasible and needed. "During the war in South Sudan, the development agencies stopped providing veterinary services. But people live off their cattle. Because the veterinarians were not there anymore to provide services like vaccinations or treatment for the cattle, cattle died; and people lost their livelihoods. Not because of the violence of the conflict, but because the veterinary services stopped, based on the assumption that they couldn't continue."

But just 10 years later, in 2017, her inaugural lecture was different. “By this time the international community had understood the message that there is a lot of normality during crises and were trying to address the challenges, risks and problems that come with it."

Connecting research with society and making an impact  

Researchers studying social sciences and humanities face different obstacles engaging with society than their counterparts in life or hard sciences. Thea Hilhorst notes: "in the social sciences, even when we produce hard findings [in the research], that doesn't mean that they're always immediately convincing." She found that what doesn't work is keeping the research under the radar until there are findings and then "throwing them" at people you think should change their behaviour or policies. "It doesn't work. Same with you and me. If somebody, out of the blue and unsolicited, drops by to give you advice, what will you do? You will just ignore it, or you will think, 'I have my own ideas. It's not very likely that you will open your arms and say 'oh, wonderful. Thank you so much."

Instead, Prof. Hilhorst has found it more effective to engage with people from the beginning and get them interested in the research. Although it can be delicate, she suggests "have a sounding board or something like that. Talk with people in the newspapers about what you're going to do and how you're doing it, and also solicit advice from different stakeholders and communities. Ask them, 'how do you think we should do it?' So that by the time you are done, they already have a keen interest in your findings." While that approach is not always successful, it's worth trying.

On the flip side, success might come from an unexpected source. Thea Hilhorst recalls travelling to the United Nations (UN) Headquarters in Geneva and presenting her research on the intersection of disaster and conflict. While the UN was interested in this research they were not really engaging, aside from posting it online.  But when she shared that research with a director of a network of disaster-focused NGOs, the reaction from the NGO community was different: "they were enthusiastic. We co-created a massive open online course (MOOC) for people working in these situations. I think over 4,000 people have taken this course."

The advice she gives to new researchers

When asked what advice she would give to young(er) academics, Thea Hilhorst shares a few key pieces of wisdom, including, "follow your intuition and your heart, do the things that you are ready to do when you are ready to do them." 

She learned a valuable lesson early on due to a failed post-Doc job interview. One of the committee members took it upon herself to give her some constructive criticism: "You have so undersold yourself in this interview. You're not a pity candidate anymore. You score much better than most people, but you will not get a job if you undersell yourself so strongly."

Hilhorst also recognises the "struggle when you're an ambitious academic that you take on too much on your plate. And someday, you pay the price." She, too, paid this price about 10 years into her career when she tried to juggle work with family life. "So after 10 years, the light went off, and I was really, really tired. And then, the lesson to learn is when those moments come, you have to surrender. Take your time to recover."

She notes that as researchers continue growing in their careers, they should be flexible and "develop a sense of the opportunities you need to grab." This advice is relevant for her even today. When something relevant to her research happens in the world, "no matter what I planned to do today and tomorrow, I just now have to sit down and write an opinion piece about this. Otherwise, the opportunity will be lost, and insights gathered over decades will not be highlighted.”

Creating a Legacy

The Spinoza Prize comes with more than just prestige: it also comes with €2.5 million for the researcher to spend as they choose. While Thea Hilhorst doesn't have a concrete plan for how to spend the prize money quite yet, one thing is clear: "the jury awarded me because I'm a trailblazer of humanitarian studies and they recognise it as a new field, an important field. So, I want to strengthen that field."