Slim has combined a career in academia, policy and practice. He started his career in 1983 with
Save the Children UK, working in Morocco, Sudan and Ethiopia and as a field officer for the Special Representative of the
UN Secretary-General in Ethiopia. Returning to the UK, he worked on Save the Children's Middle East Desk during the
first Intifada and the Iraqi Kurdish refugee crisis in Turkey, before becoming Senior Research Officer from 1992 to 1994. He was appointed senior lecturer at
Oxford Brookes University in 1994 to co-lead the new Masters in Development and Humanitarian Practice with Nabeel Hamdi at the Centre for Development and Emergency Practice (CENDEP). In 2001, Hamdi and Slim won a
Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher Education for their "exceptional innovation in the education of humanitarian professionals." Slim has since worked at the
Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue in
Geneva and as a senior research fellow at the Institute of Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict (ELAC) at the University of Oxford where he co-founded the Oxford Consortium for Human Rights with
Cheyney Ryan and other US academics in 2012. From 2015 to 2020, he was head of policy at the
International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. Slim has been a Trustee of
Oxfam GB and the
Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD) and a visiting professor at the
University of Oregon, the
Graduate Institute in Geneva, and
Tsinghua University's Schwarzman College as part of the
Schwarzman Scholars program. ==Personal life==