Ali Ali is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Global Affairs at the London School of Economics (LSE). He is also a Research Associate at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford, where he was previously a departmental lecturer in forced migration, and a postdoctoral researcher investigating the politics of the Syrian refugee crisis. Before joining Oxford he was a member of the “Security in Transition” team at LSE, researching the socioeconomic implications of armed conflicts in Syria.
Ruben Andersson is an anthropologist and associate professor in migration and development at the University of Oxford. His research is concerned with migration, borders, and security. He is the author of Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe (2014) and No Go World: How Fear Is Redrawing Our Maps and Infecting Our Politics (2019), both with the University of California Press.
Daniel Bear is a professor in the criminal justice degree program at Humber College, Toronto, Canada. He completed his MSc and PhD in social policy at the London School of Economics and his bachelor’s in sociology from the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Vesna Bojicic-Dzelilovic is codirector of the Business and Human Security Programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her main area of research is the political economy of conflict and development with a geographic focus on southeastern Europe.
Karen Büscher is an assistant professor at Conflict Research Group (CRG), Ghent University (Belgium). Her research focuses on the complex relationship between urbanization and dynamics of violent conflict and postconflict reconstruction in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and northern Uganda. Topics that run as research lines through her work include violent conflict, urban governance, rural-urban transformation, forced displacement, urban anthropology, humanitarian urbanism, and urban violence.
Sobia Ahmad Kaker is a lecturer in sociology and criminology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research focuses on everyday urban life and insecurity, particularly in the context of global south cities. She adopts a contextual, postcolonial, and ethnographic approach to her work. Sobia completed her PhD at Newcastle University in 2015. Her project, titled “Enclaves as Process: Space, Security, and Violence in Karachi,” describes how sociomaterial processes of enclavization exacerbated conflict and violence in the already divided Pakistani megacity.
Mary Kaldor is emeritus professor of global governance and director of the Conflict and Civil Society Research Unit at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is CEO of the DFID-funded Conflict Research Programme. She is the author of several books on war, human security, and global civil society. Her most recent books are International Law and New Wars (with Christine Chinkin) and Global Security Cultures.
Mary Martin is a senior research fellow in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is also director of the UN Business and Human Security Initiative at LSE IDEAS, LSE’s foreign policy think tank. Her research interests include the role of corporations in conflict prevention, private security in the international system, local ownership of peace-building, and changing concepts of security.
Johannes Christian Rieken completed his MSc and PhD in social psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he went on to work as a research officer. He obtained his bachelor in political science at Constance University (Germany) and holds an M.P.A.P. from Rutgers University. He advised government institutions—specifically police services—in the UK, Norway, and Colombia on topics including training, anticorruption, and technology. He works in organizational development in the private sector.
Efraín García Sánchez is a researcher in the Lab of Social Psychology of Inequality as part of the Department of Social Psychology at the University of Granada. He completed his MSc in psychology of social intervention and PhD in social psychology at the University of Granada, and his MSc and bachelor’s in psychology from the University of Valle (Cali, Colombia).
Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and a member of its Committee on Global Thought, which she chaired until 2015. She is a student of cities, immigration, and states in the world economy; inequality, gendering, and digitization are three key variables running through her work. She is the author of eight books, including Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy and The Global City.
Florian Weigand is a postdoctoral fellow in the Conflict and Civil Society Research Unit at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His work is concerned with armed conflicts, insurgencies, international interventions, and transnational crime. His research spans various conflict zones in Asia, including long-term field research in Afghanistan.