Dr Hugo Slim appears in BBC documentary The Trouble With Aid

Hugo Slim, Senior Research Fellow in the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict (ELAC), is featured in the recent BBC Four presentation The Trouble with Aid, discussing his experience as a humanitarian aid worker.

In the documentary on the complex ethical questions behind humanitarian aid, Hugo draws on his time working as a frontline humanitarian worker, focusing particularly on the Ethiopian famine of the early 1980s. The documentary features a good deal of criticism of the humanitarian aid movement of the last 35 years, and it can be viewed on BBC iPlayer here (expires 16/12/12).

Responding to the programme, Hugo has also written pieces on the Guardian Poverty Matters blog and the Reuters AlertNet blog, commenting that, while it was good to see a serious analysis of some of the ethical problems of delivering aid into highly politicized wars, the truth is "a little more complicated and encouraging".

"Humanitarian action is seldom morally scandalous," he writes. "As this film shows, humanitarian workers have always been ethically conscious and still are."

Hugo has advised many of the world’s leading humanitarian agencies, including the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and many leading NGOs, and is the author of 'Protection: A Guide for Humanitarian Agencies' (2005). He is leading research on humanitarian ethics at ELAC, the results of which will be published in 2013.