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Bass Connections Project Team: Evidence-Based Humanitarian Aid and Academic Partnerships in South Sudan (2024-2025)
Mara Revkin led a Bass Connections team that partnered with the United Nation’s International Organization for Migration in South Sudan (IOM) to make humanitarian aid delivery in South Sudan more effective and equitable. The project was part of a special call for teams exploring topics related to geopolitical conflict and humanitarian crises in the Middle East and beyond.
Revkin’s team laid the foundations for the Just Peace Lab, a new experiential class in which students work in teams on real-world research projects for IOM in additional countries including Ethiopia, Mexico and Sri Lanka.
Winner of the Bass Connections 2025 Leadership Award, Revkin shared her perspective and advice on team leadership with Postdoctoral Associate Leila Chelbi. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Bass Connections Leadership Award celebrates creativity, vision and mentorship. What does this acknowledgment mean to you in the context of your work with students?
I’m deeply honored, but this recognition really belongs to the whole team: an extraordinary group of 16 students from nine different graduate and professional schools, academic departments and majors.
The acknowledgment is most meaningful to me because it reflects the university’s capacity to mobilize our intellectual and institutional resources to help support frontline organizations like IOM that are working on some of the most complex humanitarian emergencies in the world today.
What was your initial vision for the project and how did it develop over time?
This project evolved from relationships I built with IOM in Iraq starting in 2017 when I was a graduate student. I worked with IOM on some field research, then as a full-time advisor to the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq. When former colleagues moved to IOM in South Sudan, they reached out for help developing an index to measure “fragility,” a state or society’s capacity to meet a population’s basic needs, provide security and withstand political, economic or environmental shocks. That was the origin of the Duke-IOM partnership. It’s been a privilege to continue working with IOM, and especially rewarding to share with students the kind of applied, partner-driven research experience that was so formative in my own career path.
Were there any unexpected challenges or opportunities that shaped the direction of the research or the student experience?
In 2025, a few months into our project, IOM and many other humanitarian aid organizations suffered an existential funding crisis when the U.S. government dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). IOM lost around 30 percent of its donor funding for the year, forcing sudden and drastic reductions in staff and programming in some of the most fragile countries in the world, including South Sudan.
Watching this unfold was a difficult but powerful education in the importance of evidence-based programming and rigorous impact evaluations to ensure that funding is being well-spent. The Fragility Index we developed with IOM is a tool that the UN and other humanitarian organizations will be able to use to improve the efficiency and fairness of aid distribution under conditions of severely limited funding and heightened scrutiny of impact.
How has leading a Bass Connections team influenced your approach to mentorship and interdisciplinary collaboration?
It’s becoming more common to collaborate across peer disciplines — for example, between economics and political science — but I never expected to have an opportunity to work with students in disciplines as different from my own as biology, to give just one example. It’s been an incredible learning experience for me to think with future doctors and environmental policymakers (alongside the social science and law perspectives I’m most familiar with) about the kinds of interdisciplinary and multi-sectoral solutions that complex humanitarian emergencies demand. Something unique about Bass Connections teams is the way they facilitate intergenerational mentorship between students at different levels of undergraduate and graduate education, and between faculty at different career stages.
Are there any moments that stand out as especially meaningful — whether in terms of student growth, team dynamics or research breakthroughs?
One of the highlights was our December trip to Washington, DC, where our students presented preliminary findings to experts and policymakers from the U.S. Department of State, USAID (in its final months), IOM and other research and humanitarian organizations working on South Sudan. It was also very exciting to see our final report published on IOM South Sudan’s website, which was a first publication for some of the students who coauthored chapters.
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Looking back, what advice would you give to faculty who are thinking about leading a Bass Connections team for the first time?
I’d suggest looking for: a partner organization that already has a clearly defined research question or other need that can be met with a concrete deliverable; alignment between the partner’s needs and the team’s collective expertise; and setting realistic goals and deadlines for both students and partners. Our initial estimate of how long a project will take is almost always too optimistic!
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I’d also consider whether a partnership will generate more work for a non-profit partner than the academic team can repay. In this competitive job market, our students benefit enormously from exposure to organizations in fields they aspire to careers in, and I always want to make sure that we’re giving back more than we’re taking over the life cycle of a project.
All partnerships require compromise. When one partner has fewer resources and more difficult working conditions than the other — which is almost always the case in partnerships between elite universities in the U.S. and frontline non-profit organizations in other countries — my view is that the better-resourced partner should meet the other more than halfway. That means prioritizing the partner's needs over our own research and learning preferences. In simulated situations, pedagogy is always the primary objective and the hypothetical "partner" bears no real cost if we make mistakes. When we work with real organizations that provide services or programming for real people, the stakes are much higher. This is precisely why partner-driven work can be such a powerful learning experience, but it comes with a lot of responsibility.
How has this experience shaped your broader academic work or your thinking around collaborative research?
I will look back on this project as a major turning point in both my research agenda and my approach to teaching and mentorship. It inspired follow-up projects on the effects of aid cuts and a new experiential class I’m teaching around peacebuilding and transitional justice projects, the Just Peace Lab.
More broadly, the project shaped how I think about the responsibilities of individual scholars and universities in producing research for policy impact and public consumption. We’re living through a period of extraordinary threats to human rights and the organizations that work to protect those rights, but I’m inspired by students who are bringing new energy and ideas to this field.
Learn More
- Browse summaries and outcomes from all nine 2024-2025 pop-up teams focused on geopolitical crises and humanitarian response.
- Read more advice from faculty who have led Bass Connections teams.