Dr Ahmed Hussein Esa is trained as biomedical scientist. He was an assistant professor at John Hopkins School of Medicine, and served on the International Advisory Board of the Arms Division of Human Rights Watch. In Somaliland he founded and directed the Institute for Practical Research and Training, Abaarso Tech University and Daryeel Hospital, the only medical center dedicated to COVID-19 treatment and research in Somaliland.

Alan Lamb was RVI company director and company secretary from 2003-2009. A London- and Nottingham-based tax adviser, he is also a specialist legal writer, concentrating on the business of law in a number of overseas jurisdictions and offshore financial centres.

Alex de Waal is Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation and a research professor at the Fletcher School, Tufts University. He was previously regional advisor on the Horn of Africa to the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and Adviser to the AU High-Level Panel on Sudan. Alex de Waal received a DPhil from Oxford in 1988. Recent publications include Darfur: A New History of a Long War (London: African Arguments, 2008, with Julie Flint), War in Darfur and the Search for Peace (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2007) and AIDS and Power: Why There is no Political Crisis— yet (London: African Arguments, 2006).

Ali Hersi has over fifteen years experience working in Kenya, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Somalia with national and international development organizations. He was Regional Director with the Society for International Development in Kenya between 2011 and 2018 and is currently Somalia Country Director with Saferworld. He joined RVI’s Board of Trustees in January 2018.

Anna Rowett was the Head of Office for the Rift Valley Institute in South Sudan for seven years between 2017 and 2024. During her time at the Institute, she developed the Institute’s presence in the country and oversaw a variety of projects including research on customary authorities, the South Sudan National Archives, and professional development of early career researchers. Anna has lived in South Sudan since 2012 and previously worked with various NGOs and with UNESCO. She currently runs Imatong Employment Solutions the company she established in 2015 with business partners, which seeks to support the development of fair and transparent human resources services in South Sudan and promote national talent.

Asnake Kefale is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science and International Relations, Addis Ababa University. He holds a PhD from Leiden University. His specialist interests are governance and federalism.

Bahru Zewde is Emeritus Professor of History at Addis Ababa University. He has authored several books and articles, most notably A History of Modern Ethiopia 1855-1991 (2001) and Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia: The reformist intellectuals of the early twentieth century (2002). He has served as Chair of the Department of History at Addis Ababa University (1982-1986) and Director of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies (1993-1996). He is currently the Executive Director of the FSS, Member of the Board of Trustees of Trust Africa and Editor of the Africa Review of Books.

Ben Parker is Director of IRIN news, a humanitarian news and analysis service.

Catherine Newbury is Professor of Government at Smith College, Massachusetts. Research interests include ethnicity and the state in Africa, democratisation, the politics of peasants and women, and the politics of violence in francophone central Africa. Author of The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860–1960 (1993).

Cherry Leonardi is a Lecturer in African History at Durham University. Her research and publications since 2001 have focused on the historical and contemporary role of chiefs in Southern Sudan and related issues of governance, state-society relations and political and judicial cultures. She was lead researcher and author of Local Justice in Southern Sudan (2010), a report for the Rift Valley Institute and the US Institute of Peace.

Conradin Perner (Kwacakworo) is an ethnographer of South Sudan and a founder of the Gurtong Trust. He is author of an eight-volume account of Anyuak culture. In 2011 he was awarded the Yellow Star medal in recognition of his contribution to knowledge about South Sudan.

David Keen is the author of The Benefits of Famine (1994), The Economic Functions of Violence in Civil Wars (1998) and Conflict and Collusion in Sierra Leone (2005). He formerly worked as a researcher, consultant and journalist.

David Newbury is Gwendolen Carter Professor of African Studies at Smith College, Massachusetts. His work has focused on pre-colonial societal transformation in the Kivus, the Rift Valley, the Rwandan famine of the late 1920s, and the transformation of a hunter-gatherer society in the eastern DRC into an agricultural economy. He is author of Land Beyond the Mists: Essays in identity and authority in precolonial Congo and Rwanda (2009).

Deborah Nightingale is a primatologist and ecologist based in Nairobi, Kenya.

Douglas Johnson first visited the Sudan in 1969 after meeting Sudanese students at Makerere University College, Uganda, where he was studying. He has done historical research in the Southern Sudan, served as Assistant Director for Archives in the former Southern Regional Government, and worked in various relief programmes during the recent civil war. He was appointed an international expert on the Abyei Boundaries Commission, and is the author, editor or co-editor of ten books on Sudanese topics.

Edward Thomas worked in Sudan and Egypt for twelve years as a teacher, human rights worker and researcher. He completed a PhD at Edinburgh University in 1998 on the history of the Republican movement, a Sufi-inspired group that called for the reform of Islamic law and civil rights for all Sudanese. He is the author of Islam’s Perfect Stranger: The Life of Mahmud Muhammad Taha (2010).

Eisei Kurimoto is Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate School of Human Sciences, Osaka University, and Vice President of the same University in charge of student affairs. He is also current President of the Japan Association for African Studies (2020-2022).

Elizabeth Hodgkin holds a PhD in History. She worked as a human rights researcher with Amnesty International from the late 1980s and is the author of numerous human rights reports for Amnesty and others. An Arabic speaker, she taught Medieval History at the University of Khartoum in the 1970s, and was one of the founders of the newsletter Sudan Update in the late 1980s.

Eric Reeves has written extensively about the Sudans—particularly Darfur—in three books and scores of academic and news media articles. He is founder and co-chair of a project in Zamzam IDP camp (North Darfur) focusing on the acute needs of girls and women who have been victims of sexual violence. He was formerly a Senior Fellow at Harvard University’s François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights.

Fana Gebresenbet is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Peace and Security Studies of Addis Ababa University. He has published on pastoralism and land issues, politics of development, security, regional integration, conflict and peacebuilding. 

Fergus Boyle worked in the Sudans as a Programme Manager for Save the Children Fund and as Civil Affairs officer and state-level coordinator for the UN Mission in Sudan and the UN Mission in South Sudan over a period of twenty years and is author of Under Shading Trees and Chum – A Memoir.

Freddie Carver is a researcher and analyst based in Addis Ababa. He has worked on South Sudan since 2003, including with Operation Lifeline Sudan between 2003 and 2005, and as DFID’s governance and conflict advisor from 2008. He is currently an independent researcher on a range of issues relating to the political economy and conflict sensitivity of aid in the Sudans and the Horn of Africa, working on RVI’s Diaspora Impacts Project and the X-Border Local Research Network project.

Dr Godefroid Muzalia is a Professor at the Department of History-Social Sciences at the Institut Supérieur Pédagogique (ISP) in Bukavu and Director of the Groupe d’Etudes sur les Conflits et la Sécurité Humaine (GEC-SH). As Director of GEC-SH, Godefroid has worked with RVI on the Usalama and Research Collaboration projects in the DRC. He taught on the RVI Great Lakes Field Course in 2018 and 2019. His expertise is conflict analysis, security sector governance and human security in the DRC.

Hussein Abdullahi Mahmoud is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences at the Technical University of Mombasa. His research interests include pastoral livelihoods, conflicts, citizenship, natural resource management and land degradation processes in the Horn of Africa. He has consulted on pastoral/livestock/conflict related projects for the Government of Kenya/African Development Bank, the FAO, Mercy Corps and CARE International in Kenya and in Somalia.

Isabel Fonseca was educated at Barnard College and Oxford University. She worked in publishing and then as an editor at the Times Literary Supplement. Her writing has appeared in the Guardian and The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker and Vogue. She is the author of Bury Me Standing and Attachment, a novel.

Jabril Ibrahim Abdulle is Director of the Center for Research and Dialogue (CRD) and a leading civil society figure in Mogadishu. In his work at CPD he has overseen numerous studies on peacebuilding, governance, economic recovery, civil society, and the Somali diaspora.

Jacob Akol is a veteran Sudanese journalist and director of the Gurtong Trust (www.gurtong.net). He is author of I Will Go the Distance: The story of a ‘lost’ Sudanese boy of the sixties (2007) and Burden of Nationality: Memoirs of an African aidworker/journalist 1970s-1990s (2006).

Dr Jama Musse Jama is an ethno-mathematician. He holds a PhD in African Studies specialising in Computational Linguistics of African Languages and has authored several books, including on traditional African games and education. A cultural activist, Jama is the founder of Hargeysa Cultural Centre, a long-term partner of RVI, and the annual Hargeysa International Book Fair. He was the host of the 13th International Congress of Somali Studies International Association in Hargeysa in 2018 and is currently President of the Somali Studies International Association.

Jason Stearns is Director of Studies of the RVI Great Lakes Course. He is author of Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: the collapse of the Congo and the great war of Africa (2011). He is the former Coordinator of the UN Group of Experts on the DRC. He has also worked for United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC), the International Crisis Group and Héritiers de la Justice.

Jean-Francois Darcq has worked for the United Nations in Southern Sudan for many years. He lives in Kenya.

Jean-Paul Kimonyo is policy advisor in the Rwandan presidency. He is the author of Rwanda, un génocide populaire (2008), based on his research on the genocide in Butare and Kibuye. He has a PhD from the University of Quebec.

Jérôme Tubiana is a researcher specializing in conflicts and migration across the Sahara and Horn of Africa contexts. Over the past 20 years, he has worked in conflict areas of Sudan, Chad, Niger, Libya, South Sudan and the Central African Republic, including for the United States Institute of Peace, the Small Arms Survey, the International Crisis Group, the Clingendael Institute, Médecins Sans Frontières and other humanitarian NGOs as well as the UN Security Council Panel of Experts on the Sudan, the African Union–United Nations Joint Mediation Support Team and the US Agency for International Development. In addition to various reports, he is the author of several books including Chroniques du Darfour (Glénat, 2010) and the award-winning graphic novel Guantánamo Kid (SelfMadeHero/Abrams, 2019). His articles have appeared in Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The Baffler, The Nation, the London Review of Books, Le Monde diplomatique and XXI.

Joanna Oyediran is an independent researcher with extensive experience in human rights and philanthropy in Eastern Africa. In 2004/2005 she designed and led an initiative at the Ford Foundation to respond to the Darfur crisis. Between 2005 and 2009, as a UN Human Rights Officer, she led a team of human rights officers responsible for monitoring and report on human rights violations in the West Darfur. Between 2009 and 2016 she worked as Sudan Program Manager in the Open Society Initiative for Eastern Africa (OSIEA), setting up two programs supporting civil society organizations in the fields of human rights, democracy and media in Sudan and South Sudan. She worked at the Open Society Foundations between 2017 and September 2022.  Joanna speaks Arabic and French at an advanced level. She is a committee member of the Gordon Memorial College Trust Fund which works to promote education for the people of Sudan and South Sudan by giving small grants to individuals and organizations.

Johan Pottier is Professor of African Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He specialises in the social dynamics of food security, media representations of conflict, and the politics of humanitarian intervention. His publications include Anthropology of Food: the social dynamics of food security (1999) and Re-Imagining Rwanda: conflict, survival and disinformation in the late 20th century (2002). His current research focuses on the conflict in Ituri District, north-eastern DRC.

John Reader is a writer and photojournalist with more than forty years’ professional experience, much of it in Africa. He holds a Honorary Research Fellowship in the Department of Anthropology at University College London and is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. His work has included contributions to major international publications, consultancies for the United Nations Environment Programme scripts for television and numerous books including Pyramids of Life (1977) and Kilimanjaro (1982).

Jonathan Kingdon is an artist and biologist. His research interests include evolutionary biology and biogeography of African mammals, especially primates and humans. He is currently editing a six volume handbook on the Mammals of Africa. He is a research associate in the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford.

Judith Gardner is a specialist in gendered, qualitative research in violent conflict-affected contexts. She has worked for over twenty years as a development practitioner in Africa and Yemen. She was the lead research and author of the RVI study on the Impact of War on Somali Men, and co-authored the book Somalia, The Untold Story: the war through the eyes of Somali women. She has taught gender and conflict studies at Sciences Po, Paris, and has been a teacher on the RVI Horn of Africa course.

Kenneth Anderson is a professor of Law at American University in Washington DC, and a research fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His research interests include international human rights, war and armed conflict, terrorism and state terrorism, nonprofit and charitable organizations, development finance and international business. Formerly General Counsel at the Open Society Institute, he was founding director of the Human Rights Watch Arms Project. From 1997-2009 he was Chair of the board of the Media Development Loan Fund (www.mdlf.org). Kenneth Anderson became an RVI US board member in 2006.

Khalif Abdirahman is a Senior Field Researcher on the LSE Conflict Research Programme, Somalia. He has been a community worker with the Somali community in the UK, and has conducted research across the Somali regions in the Horn of Africa for Tufts University, Transparency International, the Overseas Development Institute, the International Crisis Group, and with the Rift Valley Institute on livelihoods, taxation and maritime trade with Yemen.

Kjetil Tronvoll is Professor of Human Rights and Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Oslo, and Managing Partner of the International Law and Policy Group. Holding a PhD in Social Anthropology, he has undertaken fieldwork in Eritrea, Ethiopia and Zanzibar, among other African countries, focusing on democratisation/elections, conflict and identities, peace and reconciliation, and human rights. His publications on the Horn of Africa include: War and the Politics of Identity in Ethiopia: Making enemies and allies in the Horn of Africa (2009), Eritrea’s Lasting Struggle for Freedom and Human Rights (2009) and Brothers at War: making sense of the Eritrean–Ethiopian war (2000).

Kuyang Harriet Logo is a PhD Fellow at the Institute for Peace, Development and Security Studies, University of Juba, where she also teaches graduate courses in International law and International Human Rights Law. She has a law degree from Makerere University in Uganda and a Masters in Democratic Governance and the Rule of Law from Ohio Northern University in the USA. She has worked as a Rule of Law Analyst with UNDP in Sudan, South Sudan and Timor Leste. Kuyang has taught on RVI’s Sudans course and has worked on RVI’s South Sudan Customary Authorities project and X-Border Local Research Network project.

Laura M. James is Senior Middle East analyst at Oxford Analytica, a global political risk advisory firm. She was previously an affiliated lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, an expert working with the African Union High Level Implementation Panel and Senior Economic Adviser with DFID Sudan.

Lealem Mersha is a research consultant based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She holds an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Oxford, an MA in Human Rights and a BA in Political Science and International Relations from Addis Ababa University, where she has lectured in the Department of Political Science and International Relations and served as Head of the Gender Office for the Faculty of Social Sciences. She has worked with Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung and Colombia University and taught on the RVI Horn of Africa course. Her research interests include civil-military relations, political economy, migration, human rights and governance, and gender.

Lee Cassanelli is Professor of History and Director of the African Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches African history, oral history, and comparative world history. His research interests focus on the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia and Somalia) from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. He is author of The Shaping of Somalia Society (1982) and co-editor of The Struggle for Land in Southern Somalia: The War Behind the War (1996). He has taught on the Horn of Africa course since its inception in 2008.

Leif Manger is professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. His research and publications include studies on household adaptations in oasis environments, mountain environments and savannah plains. He has also published works on topics such as trade, communal labour and socio-cultural processes of Arabisation and Islamisation. He is the author of From the Mountains to the Plains The Integration of the Lafofa Nuba into Sudanese Society (1994).

Lidet Tadesse is an analyst and peacebuilding practitioner whose work focuses on African peace and security, and African multilateral approaches to peace and security through the African Union, IGAD and others.  She’s interested in regional dynamics within the Horn of Africa and the Horn’s relationship with external actors (EU, China, Gulf states etc). She works at the European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM), based in the Netherlands. Lidet has been a regular teacher on the RVI Horn of Africa course and advises RVI on Ethiopia.

Lucy Hannan is a freelance reporter, journalist, and filmmaker working in Eastern Africa since 1988, as a reporter for BBC, British newspapers, and contributor to UK’s Channel 4. Her work addresses issues like election-related violence, internally displaced people in Kenya, and Islamic radicalism in Somalia. Hannan runs a small media production company, Voxcom Ltd., which has produced films such as Obama: Change we Can, Looking at Leadership, Getting Justice – Kenya’s Deadly Game of Wait and See, and Clearing the Air. Hannan has also been involved in human rights work and has written two books: Taking Liberties (1991) and Shadow Justice (1996). She is the Director of Voxcom Ltd.

Magdeldin (Magdi) Elgizouli is a medical doctor and lecturer at Ahfad University for Women and Collaborating Researcher at the Institute of Endemic Diseases, University of Khartoum. He is currently a Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) scholar at the University of Freiburg, Germany. He blogs at http://stillsudan.blogspot.com/.

Maggie Ray is Program Director with the African Centre for Justice and Peace Studies. She was formerly the Deputy Director for the International Observation Mission for the Carter Center.

Maina Kiai is Executive Director at InformAction, based in Nairobi, Kenya. In addition, he currently serves as UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association. He has spent the last 20 years campaigning for human rights and constitutional reform across the world. He was the founder and Executive Director of the unofficial Kenya Human Rights Commission between 1992-1998, and later the first Chairman of Kenya’s National Human Rights Commission from 2003-2008. In March 2011, he was appointed as the Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association for the UN Human Rights Council.

Dr Marco Jowell is a Research Analyst with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the UK Government. He was the Director of RVI’s UNICEF Uganda Course in 2018 and the Co-Director of Studies of RVI’s Great Lakes Field Course in 2019 and 2020. His expertise is the politics, political economy and security dynamics of East and Central Africa, specifically Burundi, DRC, Rwanda and Uganda as well as the African Union. He is the author of Peacekeeping in Africa: politics, security and the failure of foreign military assistance (2018).

Mark Duffield is Professor of Development Politics at the University of Bristol. Trained in both anthropology and political economy, his field experience includes four years as Oxfam’s Country Representative in the Sudan during the latter half of the 1980s. His recent work has largely involved war-related emergencies and social reconstruction issues – in which field he has carried out many research and consultancy exercises for UN agencies, donor governments and non-governmental organisations. He is the author of War and Hunger: Rethinking International Responses to Complex Emergencies (1994) and Without Troops and Tanks: Humanitarian Intervention in Eritrea and Ethiopia (1995).

Markus Hoehne is a lecturer at the Institute of Anthropology at Leipzig University, Germany. His research focuses on identity and conflict in northern Somalia (Somaliland and Puntland), political Islam and transitional justice in the Somali inhabited territories in the Horn of Africa. His publications include Somalia zwischen Krieg und Frieden: Strategien der friedlichen Koniliktaustragung auf intemationaler und lokaler Ebene (2002), a volume co-edited with Dereje Feyissa, Borders and Borderlands as Resources in the Horn of Africa (2010) and a volumed co-edited with Virginia Luling, Milk and Peace, Drought and War. Somali culture, society and politics (2010) and Between Somaliland and Puntland (2015).

Michael Chege is currently an Advisor to the Government of Kenya on International Development Partnerships. He is also Chairman of the Board of Directors of the African Research and Resource Forum (ARRF), an independent, non-profit, research, resource, reflection and discourse organization devoted to enhancing thinking on African development.  Prof. Chege’s publications include Democratic Theory and Practice in Africa (1988) and several chapters in peer reviewed books as well as articles in international refereed journals.

Michael Ochieng Odhiambo is a trained lawyer who specialises in policy research and analysis in land, environment and natural resource management. He has supported the development of land and natural resources policies within the African Union and IGAD, and in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, South Sudan and Somalia and worked in Rwanda, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Ghana, Malawi, Mali and Mozambique. He was a member of the Technical Task Force on development of the Policy Framework for Pastoralism in Africa and participated in the development of the Framework and Guidelines on Land Policy in Africa. He has led several studies on land management and conflict with RVI in Somalia.

Michael Woldemariam is Assistant Professor of International Relations and Political Science, Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His teaching and research interests focus on the dynamics of armed conflict, the behaviour of rebel organizations and self-determination movements, and post-conflict institution building in Africa. He specialises in in the Horn of Africa, and has been a regular teacher and Director Studies on the RVI Horn of Africa course.

Munzoul Assal is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of Graduate Affairs Administration at the University of Khartoum. He is the Chairman of the Sudan Chapter of the Organization for Social Science Research in Eastern and Southern Africa (OSSREA). His research focuses on refugees, migration, IDPs and development, with a geographical focus on Darfur, Khartoum, eastern Sudan and Norway. He is the author of Beyond Labelling: Somalis and Sudanese in Norway and the challenge of homemaking (2003), and co-editor of Diasporas Within and Without Africa: Dynamism, heterogeneity, variation (2006).

Murithi Matiga is the International Crisis Group’s Project Director for the Horn of Africa. A former journalist, Murithi covered East Africa in the Guardian and served as a Contributing Op-Ed Writer to the International New York Times. He has been an editor and columnist with the Kenyan Sunday Nation. Murithi holds an MSc in comparative politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has collaborated with RVI on research and is a regular speaker at RVI Forums.

Naomi Pendle is a lecturer in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences, the Centre for Development Studies, at the University of Bath. She is a prolific researcher and writer on South Sudan, researching issues of in times of conflict and famine. She has been a director of studies and teacher RVI’s Sudan and South Sudan courses, and was a researcher on the RVI South Sudan Customary Authorities Research project Wartime Trade and the Reshaping of Power in South Sudan.

Nicki Kindersley holds a PhD in History from the University of Durham, and was a research associate in the History and Politics Faculties at the University of Cambridge. She currently teaches at the University of Cardiff. She specialises in the history of migration, political economy and armed labour in South Sudan and its borderlands. She runs several research projects with colleagues at the Universities of Juba and Khartoum and with RVI on the South Sudan Customary Authorities Project, South Sudan National Archives Project, and the X-Border Local Research Network. Nicki was the RVI representative in Juba in 2011-20112 and was instrumental in formalising RVI’s work with the South Sudan National Archives.

Nisar Majid is a specialist on food security and livelihoods analysis. He worked for the Food Security Assessment Unit in Somalia and has participated in evaluations for several international aid organisations and NGOs, as an independent consultant and with the Overseas Development Institute. He is author of The Changing Face of Food Security in Somalia (2003) and The Livelihoods Gap: Responding to the economic dynamics of vulnerability in Somalia (2002).

Pauline Otieno Skaper was the Rift Valley Institute Education and Forum Manager from April 2016 to January 2022. Under Pauline’s management, the RVI courses developed in new directions, with a successful series of bespoke courses in addition to annual one, and online courses during the pandemic. She also managed a prolific programme of Rift Valley Forum events that made the Forum a go-to place for public discussions on a range of important issues. Pauline holds an MSc in Violence, Conflict and Development from the School of Oriental and Africa Studies and an LLB from Birkbeck College, University of London.

Peter Chonka is a Lecturer in Global Digital Cultures at Kings College London.  His doctoral research was on transnational Somali-language media networks and their impact on the cultural politics of state reconstruction in the Horn of Africa. His research interest is in how the new media environment affects political reconstruction, civil society activism, and conflict in so-called ‘fragile’ states. His research uses innovative visual methods to explore displaced people’s everyday perceptions of mobility, security and urbanisation in Somali cities. He has been a Director of Studies on the RVI Horn of Africa course and a researcher on the RVI cross-border research programme.

Philip Winter was the representative for Independent Diplomat in Juba, South Sudan from 2010 to 2014. He was a Senior Advisor in MONUC 2008–10 and Chief of Staff for the Facilitator of the Inter-Congolese Dialogue 2000–03. He worked as Field Director for Save the Children UK in the DRC, Rwanda, Burundi and Southern Sudan and, earlier, as Manager of the Juba Boatyard (1976–81). He was Co-Director of the 2004 Rift Valley Institute Sudan Course and Director of the 2010 Great Lakes Course. He is the author of A Sacred Cause: The Inter-Congolese Dialogue 2000-2003. He was Acting Executive Director of the RVI from September 2015 to June 2016 and is currently Chair of the Board of the national parks of Boma and Badingilo in South Sudan.

Richard Rottenburg is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at WiSER, Wits University, Johannesburg (South Africa).

Sir Robert ffolkes was with Save the Children Fund from 1974 – 2003.

Roger is an independent researcher focused on Somalia and the wider Horn. Until the end of 2018 he led Conflict Dynamics International’s team working on political accommodation and reconciliation in Somalia and Somaliland. He has previously worked for Oxfam and Chatham House with a focus on Somalia and the Sudan’s. Roger has published widely on issues of politics in the Horn of Africa, Piracy from Somalia, African Peace and Security Architecture, and Africa’s relations with the EU.

Sada Mire is the Director-General of the Department of Antiquities in the Ministry of Tourism and Culture of Somaliland. Her main interests are archaeological and anthropological research, cultural heritage policy and management, and post-conflict reconstruction of cultural resources. She serves on the editorial board of Heritage Management, and is the Somali representative of the World Archaeological Congress. She is the founding editor of the websites Somali Heritage and Archaeology, www.somaliheritage.org, and African Heritage and Archaeology – www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/aha.

Sally Healy is an independent consultant. She was formerly Associate Fellow of the Africa Programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House and a specialist in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. She continues to work on the region as an independent consultant focussing on the analysis of regional peace and security. She convened the Horn of Africa Group at Chatham House and wrote the Group’s report Lost Opportunities in the Hom of Africa: How Conflicts Connect and Peace Agreements Unravel (2008).

Sharon E. Hutchinson is Professor Emerita of Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Director of South Sudan Cultural Productions LLC, an independent book publishing company dedicated to preserving and promoting the rich cultural and linguistic heritage of South Sudanese wherever they may reside. Literate and fluent in both Arabic and Nuer, she is author of Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War and the State (1996, 2023) and numerous other publications documenting processes of socio-cultural, economic, political and religious change among diverse Nuer communities from 1930 through the present. A growing collection of original field photographs, audio-recordings, maps, human rights reports and textual analyses that she has created during more than 45 years of engaged research may now be viewed on her website (https://www.nuerdilemmas.com).

Steven Serels is a Research Fellow at the Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient at Martin Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, and as Visiting Scholar at Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Steven is an economic and environmental historian whose research focuses on the causes and consequences of structural poverty in the Southern Red Sea Region (SRSR). He has written three research papers for RVI: Epidemics in the African Red Sea Region: A history of uneven disease exposure (Oct 2020); Unequal Adaptations: A history of environmental change in the Sudan-Eritrea-Ethiopia border region (August 2021); Purchasing Insecurity: The African Red Sea region and the global food trade (October 2022).

Toby Fenwick-Wilson is an explorer and photographer. Formerly an expert guide for Abercrombie and Kent and field coordinator for the Rift Valley Institute in Southern Sudan, he has also worked in the Himalayas and China.

Tom Odhiambo is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature at the University of Nairobi. He holds a PhD from the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where he was also a Research Fellow between 2003 and 2007. His numerous publications reflect his interests in Kenyan Popular Culture and Fiction; Masculinity and the Family in Kenya; Gender and Sexuality in Urban Kenya.

Tymon Kiepe is Policy and Research Manager at Open Ownership, an organisation dedicated to increasing transparency over who owns and controls companies across the world. Between 2012 and 2018, Tymon worked with RVI contributing to many aspects of the Institute’s development, in particular RVI’s information management systems and publications outputs. Tymon left RVI to join the Clingendael Institute and Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Netherlands.

Ushari Mahmud is a scholar, human rights activist and author. He has worked for the past 15 years to document and protest human rights abuses in Sudan. He is an advocate for the rights of internally displaced populations and of children affected by armed conflict in Sudan. He previously worked with UNICEF in the field of child protection.