Ronald Ofteringer
Ronald has more than 30 years of experience in field work, strategy development, and management in the humanitarian field, in solidarity-based and neutral-impartial organisations.
For medico international (Frankfurt/Berlin) he worked on relief and medical aid projects with partner organisations in Turkey, its Kurdish areas, Iraq and its Kurdistan Region, Israel/Palestine and Lebanon, which involved engagement with armed groups and opposition movements on issues of medical relief, human rights and humanitarian law, as well as advocacy on arms exports and weapons contamination.
For the ICRC, he has worked since 2000 in various positions in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Yemen and the Magreb, before joining the HQ as advisor to the director of operations for global affairs, where he worked with field delegations and HQ teams on humanitarian engagement with non-state actors in high-risk, high complexity operational contexts marked by the counterterrorism paradigm, as well as on humanitarian dialogue with religious leaders and faith-based aid groups, and the perception of humanitarian actors in times of global polarization.
From 2017 to mid- 2020, he was head of the ICRC delegation in Cairo, Egypt, and from Sept 2020 to January 2021 ad interim in Bamako, Mali. As ICRC’s regional advisor for humanitarian access in the Sahel, based in Niamey (2022-23), he worked with the ICRC delegations in the region on strategies for engagement with the main non-state parties to the conflict, and engaged in ICRC’s dialogue with state authorities on humanitarian access and principled humanitarian action.
Ronald holds an MA in Islamic Studies, Ethnology and Political Science and speaks Arabic, English, French, German, Turkish and some Kurdish.
Featured work
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Ronald Ofteringer (2011) La dialectique de l’image, de l’acceptation et du travail humanitaire dans les situations de conflit et de violence organisée. In: MSF, Dans l’œil des Autres, Perception de l’action humanitaire et de MSF, Lausanne.
Ronald Ofteringer & Ralf Bäcker (1994) A Republic of Statelessness. Three Years of Humanitarian Intervention in Iraqi Kurdistan. In: MERIP Middle East Report 187-188.
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Ronald Ofteringer (1996) Palästinensische Flüchtlinge und der Friedensprozess, Palästinenser im Libanon. medico international / INAMO / Das Arabische Buch.
