Dr Edwina Thompson has spent 15 years working as a humanitarian practitioner or applied academic in complex environments - from South Central Somalia, Sudan, the DRC and Sri Lanka to Papua New Guinea, Pakistan, Haiti and Afghanistan - and has supported teams remotely in their difficult negotiations at the CIV-MIL interface. Edwina was one of a three-member international team that revised the international Steering Committee for Humanitarian Response’s Guidelines on Humanitarian-Military Relations. In her role as Director of Beechwood International she has worked on peacebuilding, security sector reform and humanitarian projects with non-Western governments such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea and Lebanon (in relation to Syria) and with Western governments on defining what ‘smart power’ looks like in relation to fragile states. Earlier in Edwina’s career, she worked for Amnesty International and the Red Cross in refugee case management, and in 1998, she joined the British Royal Navy as a Reserve Officer.
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