Peace News Expert Network

Gordon Crawford is Research Professor in Global Development at the Centre for Trust, Peace, and Social Relations (CTPSR), Coventry University.

Grace Yeanay is the Liberia Country Director of the Purdue Peace Project.

Haobijam Brijesh Singh grew up in Imphal, Manipur, a conflict-affected state in northeastern India. He is a UGC-NET/JRF and Senior Research Fellowship (SRF) awardee and is currently pursuing a PhD in the Department of Sociology and Social Work at Christ University, Bengaluru. His research focuses on ethnic politics, Indigenous governance, social exclusion, and peacebuilding in multi-ethnic societies, with particular attention to smaller and marginalised tribal communities in Manipur. His work examines how micro-minorities navigate power, identity, and institutional hierarchies amid recurring conflicts and political instability. As a scholar with lived familiarity with the region and sustained academic engagement, he seeks to bridge research and policy discourse, advocating for inclusive governance and structural justice as essential foundations for sustainable peace.

Harriet Lamb is the CEO of  International Alert, where she leads work across 20 countries.

Helen Kezie-Nwoha is a feminist peace activist and a women human rights defender from Nigeria. Since 2016, she has been working as the Executive Director at The Women’s International Peace Centre (The Peace Centre), formerly known as Isis Women’s International Cross Cultural Exchange (Isis-WICCE). The Peace Centre is a feminist organisation that focuses on promoting women’s rights in conflict and post-conflict settings.

Helen has supported and led initiatives to support women’s participation in peace processes and to promote gender responsive post conflict reconstruction and the implementation of UNSCR1325 at all levels. She has through the work of her organization supported the establishment of women’s mediators’ network in Ugandaand South Sudan including in refugee settlements in Uganda. These networks have been instrumental in promoting peace within the refugee settlements and host communities.

Ms. Kezie-Nwoha has an academic background in gender and international development with over 20 years of experience working on women’s rights, gender, peacebuilding, conflict resolution and governance in Africa. She is a member of the Network of African Women Mediators (FEMWISE), a member of the African Union ECOSSOC Advisory Group on Women, Peace and Security, and the Chair of the Gender Is My Agenda Campaign (GIMAC) a network of over 55 organizations that advocate for gender mainstreaming at the African Union.

Ian Quick is an independent consultant and writer. He produces and hosts the Rethink Fragility podcast, an oral history of conflict, crises and the aid business.

Dr. Ibrahim Bangura is an Associate Professor in the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone. Currently, he is a visiting fellow collaborating with Dr. John Gledhill at the Department of International Development, University of Oxford under the Africa Oxford Initiative (AfOx) Visiting Fellowship programme.

Dr. Bangura’s research examines peacebuilding, gender, youth engagement, and post-war transitions in West Africa. With a PhD in Economics from HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management, he has published extensively on disarmament, peacebuilding, and social movements in Africa. His recent work includes two edited volumes on youth-led movements and the reintegration of ex-combatants in Africa. Additionally, Dr. Bangura has held roles in human rights and post-conflict transition initiatives in Sierra Leone, and as a Result Oriented Monitoring (ROM) expert, he has assessed over 100 European Union funded projects and programmes in approximately 30 countries in Africa, In 2020, he developed the Women, Peace and Security Guidelines for the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and he is currently finalising the Gender Framework for Peace Support Operations of ECOWAS, adding practical experience to his academic expertise.

Dr. Ignasi Torrent is a senior lecturer in Politics and International Relations in the Department of Social Sciences at University of Hertfordshire. He holds a PhD in International Relations from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He teaches modules on peacebuilding, international conflicts, International Relations Theory and the Anthropocene. His previous academic engagements include research and teaching fellowships at University of Sierra Leone (Freetown), the City University of New York and University of Westminster (London). His research interests are framed in the area of Critical Peace and Conflict Studies, International Relations Theory, the Anthropocene and new materialisms.

Ion Marandici, Ph.D. (Rutgers U. 2017) studies the political economy of reforms across Eastern Europe and East Asia, Russian foreign policy, conflict processes across Eurasia and nationalism. His publications include articles in Nationalities Papers, Problems of Post-Communism, Eurasian Geography and Economics, Demokratizatsiya, Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society, Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies as well as chapters in collaborative volumes. Ion was the recipient of a doctoral fellowship from the Open Society Institute in New York. At Rutgers, he has been regularly teaching courses in comparative politics, international relations, research methods, and legal philosophy. In 2016, Ion was a visiting researcher at the Graduate Institute of National Development (National Taiwan University in Taipei). In 2022, he worked as a consultant on open data reforms in Central Asia as well as on anti-corruption policies in Eastern Europe for the World Bank. Ion knows several foreign languages.

Professor James Kewir Kiven is a Research Hub Leader for Central Africa at the African Leadership Centre (ALC), Nairobi.

Jamie Hagen is a queer lesbian woman working as a  Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in International Relations at Queen's University Belfast. She is the founding co-director of the Centre for Gender in Politicsand currently lead researcher on a 2022-2023 British Academy (BA) Innovation Fellowship which focuses on improving engagement with lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LBTQ) women in WPS Programming.Prior to becoming a lecturer, she worked with organizations including the Global Network of Women Peacebuilders and Peacewomen.

Jasmine R. Linabary is the Associate Director of Research and Operations for the Purdue Peace Project.

Jeff Hearn is a professor and writer in Finland (Hanken School of Economics), Sweden (Örebro University), and the UK (University of Huddersfield), and a long-term activist on changing men and masculinities. His most recent books are: Age at Work, with Wendy Parkin, Sage, 2021, Knowledge, Power and Young Sexualies, with Tamara Shefer, and Digital Gender-Sexual Violations, with Matthew Hall and Ruth Lewis, both Routledge 2022.

Dr. Jennifer Ptacek (Ph.D., Purdue University) is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Dayton in Ohio, USA. Her research examines intersections of organizational communication and health, including well-being, specifically in contexts of peacebuilding, healthcare organizations, and leadership. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses including organizational communication, health disparities, and communication for health professionals. Her published work has appeared in outlets including Health Communication, International Journal of Business Communication, and Journal of Applied Communication Research. Her recent book is titled Leader-Member Exchange and Organizational Communication: Facilitating a Healthy Work Environment (2021, Palgrave Macmillan).

Jessica Berns is President of Jessica Berns Consulting, which she founded in 2011 and has been involved with the Purdue Peace Project since its founding.

Johan Brosché is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University.

John Avery is a theoretical chemist, peace activist and part of a group associated with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.

Jon H. Gaviola is a PhD candidate at the University of Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand. His research interests focus on building the resilience of vulnerable and minoritized communities and their livelihoods to climate, conflict and disaster risks.

Judith Verweijen is an Assistant Professor at the Department of International Relations at the University of Groningen. Her work is situated at the intersection of conflict studies, political ecology and political geography. She looks at militarization, dynamics of violence and the interplay of armed and social mobilization in natural resource conflicts in areas of protracted violence. She focuses on eastern DRC, where she has conducted intermittent fieldwork since 2010.

Julia Julstrom-Agoyo holds a B.A. in International Studies – Human Rights from the University of Iowa and is completing her Master’s in International Affairs with a specialization in International Conflict Resolution at Columbia University – SIPA in New York. She is an intern at Adapt Peacebuilding, where she contributes to the organization’s efforts to promote adaptive and systemic approaches to peacebuilding in areas affected by violent conflict. Julia’s areas of focus include conflict transformation, transitional justice, forced migration, and criminal justice and immigration policy reform.

Juneseo Hwang is a research associate at the DFG Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Futures of Sustainability” at the University of Hamburg. His work centres on reimagining ideas and approaches to promote sustainable and just peace for all inhabitants of the planet while addressing the legacies of war and violence. His primary areas of research and activism include peace and disarmament, the rights of nature, ecocide law, ecological justice, conservation, and environmental crime and policing. He has collaborated extensively with communities and environmental activists in Ireland, South Korea, Japan, Germany, Italy, and the United States. Additionally, he holds a visiting fellowship at the Centre for Sustainability, Equality, and Climate Action at Queen’s University Belfast. Currently, he is writing a monograph on sustainable peace and eco-justice in Northern Ireland, exploring the potential of environmental peacebuilding through grassroots activism throughout the island of Ireland.

Karen Ross is an Associate Professor in the Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security and Global Governance at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and an associate with the dialogue-focused organization Essential Partners.  Her research, teaching, and practitioner work focus on the role that dialogue and grassroots educational initiatives can play in contributing to positive social change at community and societal levels.

Kathryn Nash is a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Edinburgh Law School. Her research focuses on the role of regional organisations in peace and security, and she is the author of African Peace: Regional Norms from the Organisation of African Unity to the African Union (MUP February 2021).

Kathy Kelly co-ordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence. In Kabul, she is the guest of the Afghan Peace Volunteers.

Kjetil Tronvoll carried out anthropological studies in Eritrea, Ethiopia and Zanzibar, and has been involved in human rights, peace processes and research in Eritrea, Ethiopia and other African countries. He was the first non-Eritrean researcher to enter Eritrea in August 1991 after the Eritrean War of Independence in which the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) and the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) overthrew the Derg. He stayed in a highland village studying the relation between the villagers and the EPLF. Tronvoll was an observer in the 1993 Eritrean independence referendum.

In a 2009 report on human rights in Eritrea commissioned by the Oslo Center, Tronvoll stated that while drafts of Eritrean law codes prepared in 1997 were consistent with international principles of law, the new law codes had no real effect. He said that civil society organisations and independent newspapers briefly existed in Eritrea in 2001 following the 1998–2000 Eritrean–Ethiopian War, but were crushed from September to December 2001. He estimated the number of political prisoners in the range 10,000–30,000 and said that there was widespread and systematic torture and extrajudicial killings, with "anyone" for "any or no reason", including children eight years old, people over 80 years old and ill people, being liable to be arrested. Tronvoll summarised the situation stated that in 2009, Eritrea had "developed into one of the world's most totalitarian and human rights-abusing regimes".

Tronvoll has expertise in the law of Ethiopia. Tronvoll was a professor of human rights at the University of Oslo until 2010. As of 2021, Tronvoll held the position of professor of peace and conflict studies at Bjørknes University College. He was also director of a consultancy firm Oslo Analytica.

Kristian Åtland is a Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) and Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Nord University.

Kristine Höglund is Professor at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University, Sweden.

Kyoko Kusakabe is a professor at the Gender and Development Studies (GDS) program at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT).

Dr.Lakshmi Priya is a Research Fellow at the Indian Council of World Affairs, New Delhi. She has a Ph.D. in West Asian Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and her doctoral thesis was on “Status of Women in Syria under Hafiz al-Assad, 1970-2000.” The thesis deals with the role of the Syrian state in empowering women during Hafiz al Assad’s rule. She wrote her M.Phil dissertation on “India’s Relations with Syria, 1991-2008.” Her research interests include domestic and foreign policy of Syria, Indo-Gulf relations and gender and feminist discourse in the Middle East. Before joining ICWA, she was a researcher with the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi, as well as Indian Social Institute, New Delhi, and has also worked at the Office of the Cultural Attaché, Embassy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, New Delhi. She has also worked as an editor for Delhi-based Arihant Publishers. Dr. Priya has a Masters in Arabic from the School of Languages in JNU and is fluent in three languages – English, Hindi and Arabic. In addition to West Asian studies, she has an interest in international relations and political theory. She has published three research articles including on the legitimacy of the Baath in Syria and the Gramscian idea of “cultural hegemony” that appeared in the prestigious social science journal – Social Action. Her other research paper on Galtung’s idea of “positive peace” in the Syrian context was published in Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. The third on feminist discourses in Syria was published in Journal of West Asian Studies and is part of recommended reading for undergraduate curriculum in University of Bern, Switzerland. She regularly contributes articles and commentaries on contemporary developments in the Middle East. Her latest writings can be accessed here.

Dr. Laurence L. Delina is a Filipino scholar from Mindanao, specializing in climate and society. He serves as an assistant professor in the Division of Environment and Sustainability at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.