Christopher Lockyear #

I am a humanitarian, commentator, and qualified mediator with over two decades of experience in conflict environments, negotiation, humanitarian diplomacy, and senior institutional leadership.

Currently, I am Executive-in-Residence at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy. I’m working on questions that sit at the intersection of political mediation, humanitarian access and protection of civilians — how they reinforce each other, where they conflict, and what practitioners actually need to navigate both. I am also writing about the complexity of humanitarian action in a way that I hope is accessible, and - paradoxically - not too complex!

I have spent most of my career working in humanitarian aid, the last seven and a half years of which as Secretary General of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF / Doctors Without Borders) — a role I held from 2018 until April 2026. It was a period of extraordinary pressure on the humanitarian system: ongoing crises in Palestine, Sudan, Ukraine, Afghanistan, a global pandemic, and a sustained political assault on the institutions and norms that had, imperfectly but meaningfully, tried to protect civilians in conflict.

As Secretary General, I helped to coordinate an organisation of nearly 70,000 people working across more than 70 countries. The role was part institutional leadership, part political negotiation, part public advocacy — and, when things went badly: accountability. With the support and drive of exceptional teams around the world, I engaged governments in negotiations over humanitarian access and their responsibility for the safety of humanitarian workers, as well as their own populations. I briefed the UN Security Council on humanitarian catastrophes in Gaza and Sudan. I also led a large and complex organisation through a period of genuine transformation: in governance, in strategy, in how we thought about equity and representation.

My motivation is a conviction that the life of someone caught in a crisis in Khartoum, Sudan or Khan Younis, Palestine, carries the same moral weight as the life of your school friend or your next-door neighbour.

The broader context cannot be ignored. I am preoccupied with how conflict has expanded into domains that existing legal and political frameworks simply weren’t designed to govern — AI-accelerated kill chains, cyber operations, contested maritime space: the grey zones of sub-threshold coercion. These aren’t future threats; they’re current realities, already reshaping how wars are fought and how civilians are harmed. At the same time, I’m wary of the assumption that novelty requires entirely new tools. Relationship-based diplomacy, back-channel negotiation, patient trust-building — the classical instruments of conflict resolution — remain as relevant as ever. The challenge is learning to apply them in domains that move faster, are harder to attribute, and resist the kind of public accountability that traditional conflict at least occasionally permits — and to know when new tools genuinely help, and when they don’t.

After studying engineering at the University of Cambridge, I spent several years in the oil and gas industry — an experience that sharpened my interest in energy geopolitics and gave me, across the North Sea, the Gulf Coast and offshore Mumbai, an early grounding in cross-cultural negotiation and operational decision-making under pressure.

I have a passion for applying philosophy and understanding the ideas and concepts of others, so many years after thinking I had finally finished study I returned to complete a Masters in Philosophy at the University of Exeter, UK. The combination of engineering and philosophy may seem like polar opposites, but to me, it makes a lot of sense.

I’m also a Yale World Fellow, a qualified and certified mediator, and — somewhat to my own surprise — the holder of an honorary doctorate in law from the University of Exeter.

I teach a module on ETH Zurich / Swisspeace / FDFA Peace Mediation Course, and regularly guest lecture on MBA, MPP and International Relations courses on topics such as humanitarian access and peace mediation, humanitarian response, complex emergencies and organisation development.

Over the years I have written, spoken, and engaged with the media on humanitarian crises, diplomacy, and the politics of conflict — in op-eds, academic forums, UN briefings, and broadcast interviews. A selection of that work is collected in the Impact section of this site.