Experts on countries of origin by surname

Dr. Frédérick Madore is a Research Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Germany, where he specializes in the study of Muslim societies and religious movements in francophone West Africa. Through extensive fieldwork in Côte d'Ivoire, Benin, Togo, and Burkina Faso, he has developed deep expertise in understanding how religious communities navigate social and political change. His research includes contributions to the Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC), an open-access database documenting Islam in West Africa.

His book on religious activism at universities in Togo and Benin examines the transformation of campus life through faith-based organizations since the 1970s. Previously, he held positions as a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Florida and as a Part-Time Professor at the University of Ottawa. Dr. Madore has published extensively on Muslim societies and religious movements, including two monographs, an edited volume, and numerous peer-reviewed articles. His research offers new insights into the dynamics of Islam and religious movements in contemporary West Africa.

Saqeb Mahbub is a UK-educated Barrister, independent judicial reform consultant and part-time Lecturer at North South University based in Bangladesh. Besides legal practice, the expert is regularly consulted by international organisations such as UNDP, UNHCR and USAID. He has conducted research, advisory and consultancy work in Bangladesh on the formal and informal justice systems, freedom of speech and other political rights, anti-corruption, violence against women, minority rights, etc. Saqeb Mahbub has produced expert reports for UK and US courts and tribunals covering the following topics:
(i) Political situation in Bangladesh (including in-depth analysis of all the political parties (BNP, Jamaat, etc), senior and local leaders of opposition parties);
(ii) The criminal justice system; 
(iii) Laws curtailing free speech, state attitude towards opposition;
(iii) Judicial independence;
(iv) Freedom of speech; 
(v) Extra judicial killings;
(vi) Enforced disappearances;
(vii) Police Harassment; 
(viii) Ghost and False cases;
(ix) Persecution of human rights defenders; 
(x) Persecution of LGBTQ community members; 
(xi) Persecution of religious minorities and violent extremism;… Read more

Dr. Basem Mahmud is a Syrian-Spanish sociologist specializing in emotions, forced migration, and post-conflict recovery, with deep expertise in Syria’s social and cultural contexts. Born and raised in Syria, his lived experience enriches his academic and applied research, providing nuanced understanding of the challenges faced by displaced populations. He holds a PhD in Sociology, supported by a DAAD fellowship, and was awarded the prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship for postdoctoral research on refugee labor and structural inequalities in the global economy. His work bridges academic research and practical field applications through partnerships with international organizations, civil society, and research institutes. He focuses on key issues such as transitional justice, civic engagement, community resilience, victim-centered documentation, and social reconstruction in Syria and similar post-conflict settings. Fluent in Arabic, English, and Spanish, Dr. Basem Mahmud combines advanced qualitative and mixed-methods research skills with deep contextual knowledge. He is committed to collaborating on evidence-based projects that foster social transformation and sustainable recovery. Clients can expect strategic research insights, expert project leadership,… Read more

Dr. Allysha C. Maragh-Bass is a clinical trials scientist, educator, and board-certified health and wellness coach. She has expertise in HIV prevention and adolescent health primarily in Black and Brown Communities globally. Dr. Maragh-Bass has 20 years of research experience in HIV/AIDS, substance use, qualitative, and quantitative methods in clinical, translational and community-based research and programs. She navigates seamlessly between international development spaces and academia and has experience in over 10 countries working in global public health and development with funding from NIH, CDC, USAID, and others. Domestically, she has worked in health care settings from primary care to surgery and with individuals marginalized by race, sexual orientation/gender identity, and/or disability. In addition to her nonprofit-based role, Dr. Maragh-Bass is also a highly experienced lecturer and educator, who has held adjunct faculty positions for 15+ years. 

I have studied, worked and lived in Kenya and Tanzania since 2008, with research consulting firms, think tanks and non-profits. This experience in policy research spaces lends itself to my teaching on health policy at LSHTM. I also worked as a research consultant for UZIKWASA, a civil society organisation in Pangani, Tanzania engaging communities in developing grassroots leadership capacity for GVP prevention. With a background in political theory, my main research focus at LSHTM is on community engagement in gender violence prevention and emergent disease outbreaks. I work closely with PAVE, a collaborative group studying the Politics and Anthropology of Violence & Epidemics.

Kimberly Marten is a professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University, specializing in international relations, international security, environmental politics, and Russia. She is a faculty member and executive committee member of Columbia’s Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies, and Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. Her recent publications have analyzed Russia’s Wagner Group “private” military company (she was honored to testify before Congress on that topic in 2020 and 2022), Russian activities in Latin America (she was honored to testify before Congress on that topic in 2022); Russian activities in Africa; Russia/NATO relations and the Russian reaction to NATO enlargement; and the politics of the changing Arctic. 

She has written four books, including Engaging the Enemy: Organization Theory and Soviet Military Innovation (Princeton, 1993), which received the Marshall Shulman Prize, and Warlords: Strong-Arm Brokers in Weak States (Cornell, 2012). The Council on Foreign Relations commissioned her special report, Reducing Tensions between Russia and NATO (2017). In addition to over 30 academic journal articles and book chapters, she has written more than 50 policy analyses in publications including the… Read more

Elise Massicard is a permanent senior research fellow at the French National Center for Scientific Research / Centre d’Etudes Internationales, Paris. From 2010 to 2014, she was a research fellow at the French Institute of Anatolian Studies in Istanbul. She was a visiting fellow at the University of California at Berkeley (2009), at Northwestern University (2019) and Université Libre de Bruxelles (2021). Her research focuses on the political sociology of contemporary Turkey, especially state-society relations, sociology of the state, party politics, social movements, identity politics, and informal politics. She has authored The Alevis in Turkey and Europe: Identity and Managing Territorial Diversity (Routledge, 2012) and more recently, Street-level Governing. Negotiating the State in Urban Turkey (Stanford University Press, 2022). She has co-edited with Nicole Watts Negotiating Political Power in Turkey: Breaking up the Party (Routledge, 2012); and with Marc Aymes and Benjamin Gourisse, Order and Compromise. Government Practices in Turkey from the Late Ottoman Empire to the Early 21st Century (Brill, 2015). She has published extensively in academic journals. She is Editor-in-Chief of the refereed journal Critique Internationale. She is a founding member and a board member of… Read more

Shubh Mathur writes about nationalism, minorities, borderlands, counterinsurgency, human rights and environmental ethics. She has conducted fieldwork in India and Kashmir, focusing on state and state-supported violence. Her latest research looks at the history of Indian state violence against religious and ethnic minority groups.

She is the author of two books — The Human Toll of the Kashmir Conflict: Grief and Courage in a South Asian Borderland and The Everyday Life of Hindu Nationalism, and has co-edited a volume on Kashmir after 2019. She is currently working on a comparative history of Indian counterinsurgency since 1947.

Mathur has provided translation and community support services to asylum seekers in the New York - New Jersey area.

Meghan McCormack has over a decade of international development experience, with expertise spanning international human rights law, project design and implementation, and democratic governance.

During her eight years living and working in Kyrgyzstan, Meghan travelled across the country to research informal dispute resolution in un-demarcated border zones, led the design and implementation of numerous country-wide studies on human rights norms and beliefs, trained domestic lawyers on international human rights law, and founded her own CSO to represent disadvantaged households in court. In Kosovo, she has led the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Mission in Kosovo portfolios to enhance parliamentary democracy, electoral processes, and decentralised local governance — contributing to Kosovo’s successful parliamentary and electoral reforms in 2022 and 2023, respectively. As an independent consultant, her work has spanned Central Asia and the Balkans, encompassing monitoring and evaluation reports, grant proposals and project documents, legislative drafting, and qualitative research for UNDP, UNICEF, UN Women, USAID, Tetra Tech, and Search for Common Ground, among other organisations.

Meghan holds a J.D. from… Read more

Melyn McKay (Ph.D.) is a research anthropologist specialising in religious nationalist movements, ethics, conflict and peace building. Amongst her former and current clients: the World Bank, WFP, UNICEF, UNDP, UNOPS, EU, FCDO, USAID, DANIDA, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and numerous International NGOs. Melyn's academic interests focus on Myanmar, the far right, and religious nationalism in Asia. She has also advised and/or overseen research in Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, China, Thailand, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, South Sudan, Burundi, Ghana, and Guatemala. 

Kristen McLean is an Assistant Professor in the International Studies Program at the College of Charleston. She received her B.A. and Master of Public Health (M.P.H.) from Emory University and her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Yale University. Her academic areas of specialization include medical anthropology and global health. Over the past ten years she has been engaged in academic and international development work on issues related to youth, gender, mental health, and medical humanitarianism. Her work is primarily situated in Sierra Leone, where she has been conducting research since 2013. 

Dr. McNeal is an anthropologist with specialization in Caribbean ethnology and Atlantic cultural history and a long-term focus on Trinidad and Tobago. His first book — “Trance and Modernity in the Southern Caribbean: African and Hindu Popular Religions in Trinidad & Tobago” (2011, 2nd ed. 2015) — is a comparative historical ethnography of African and Hindu traditions of trance performance and spirit mediumship in the southern Caribbean, as well as the postcolonial politics of race, religion, diaspora, nationalism and multiculturalism. He has also reconstructed the history and cultural politics of Indo-Trinidadian mortuary ritual, “Death and the Problem of Orthopraxy in Caribbean Hinduism: Reconsidering the Politics and Poetics of Indo-Trinidadian Mortuary Ritual,” which is the subject of my first documentary film project. 

He is currently completing a book on men, sexuality, queer globalization and the politics of citizenship in TT, entitled “Queering the Citizen: Dispatches from Trinidad and Tobago,” in relation to which he has also conducted research in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands and published several papers on queer and trans refugeeism and the political economy of Caribbean asylum-seeking in Europe. He is also working on a third book project on… Read more

Suzanne Menhem is a Professor and Researcher at the Lebanese University, Institute of Social Sciences, and an independent consultant with extensive expertise in Social Sciences, Anthropology, Demography, and Migration. She is renowned for her leadership in managing and implementing complex research projects and has made significant contributions to international initiatives such as Towards a Cultural Understanding of the Other (TOGETHER), Mediterranean Youth, NEETs and Women Advancing Skills, Employment, and Awareness in the Blue and Green Economy (MYSEA), and Viral Circulations and Social Dynamics. Her work has included conducting surveys, interviews, and focus groups to explore issues related to these projects, providing critical insights into global social dynamics. Dr. Menhem’s research interests encompass migration, gender equality, and socioeconomic development, with a strong focus on human rights-based inquiry. She has led key projects such as the National Study on Child Sexual Abuse in Lebanon, New Migrants in Lebanon, and The Syrian Youth Refugees’ Social and Economic Engagement in Lebanon, addressing the needs of vulnerable populations and tackling urgent social issues.As Head of the Department of Methodology, Epistemology, and Techniques at Lebanese University, Dr… Read more

Dr. Mariangela Mihai is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and WGSS at Western Washington University. She holds a PhD in anthropology and film from Cornell University and has served as a Postdoctoral and a Gender+ Initiative Fellow at Georgetown. With fieldwork experience spanning over a period of 12 years, Dr. Mihai looks at Indigenous resistance, borderland disputes, parastatal violence, as well as migration, refugee, and LGBTQIA+ issues on the India-Bangladesh-Myanmar-China borderlands, "the Balkans,” and the U.S. As a co-founder of Ethnocine, an Impact Filmmaking collective, she engages in collaborative films and grassroots human rights campaigns across transnational borders, addressing refugee, environmental, labor, LGBTQIA+, and healthcare issues. Dr. Mihai's NGO collaborations include the International Rescue Committee, United Way, and the Romanian Association Against AIDS.

Hugh Miles is an Arabic and French speaking journalist who has been living in Cairo for most of the past 20 years researching and writing about all aspects of Arab society and culture. Since 2004 Miles has covered news in North Africa and the Middle East region professionally for diverse international media including the BBC, Al Jazeera, New York Times, Telegraph, Guardian, London Review of Books, Mirror, Mail, Sun and many others. He is a contributor to the Global Organized Crime Index designed to assess levels of organised crime in 193 UN member states and gives regular, ongoing training sessions to the UK FCDO about organised crime in the Middle East as well as, separately, the media environment in the Middle East.

Miles is the founder of Arab Digest, an independent UK ltd. media company specialising in Arab affairs. Arab Digest is an online private members club where business leaders and regional experts discuss the latest developments in the Middle East and North Africa each day. Paying members include the United Nations, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, The Economist, Oxford University, King’s College London University, Princeton University, BAE, Chevron and many more. 

Dr. Talia Mills received her PhD from King's College London in Geography and Master of Science from the London School of Economics in Gender, Development and Globalization. Her research focuses on the multiple forms of gendered violence that intersect across the displacement process in Mexico and Central America. She publishes on topics related to such violence including the gendered dimensions of impunity in seeking asylum as well as migrant women's resistance to violence in Mexico. In addition, she is an experienced program and project evaluator with areas of expertise in sexual and reproductive health, gender & climate change, gender-based violence and refugee protection. She works and conducts research in Mexico where she has lived since 2016.   

The expert has prepared hundreds of expert opinions on Pakistani Law matters for English Law firms and is an expert on all Political Groups in Pakistan.

The Expert is a former Independent Contractor for the U.S. Embassy in London, specializing in political and media monitoring, screening, and translation. With a background that includes roles in both administration and education, the Expert has also served as a Lecturer at university colleges in Kosovo. His career reflects a broad range of experience in political monitoring and related fields.

As a country of origin expert witness, he has authored over 50 expert reports in the past three years and brings 22 years of professional experience to the role.

The Expert is a former Independent Contractor (political and media monitor/screener and translator) for the US Embassy in London. The Expert has held various roles in education and political monitoring, including serving as a Lecturer at the European College Dardania in Kosovo and working as an Independent Contractor for the US Embassy in London, showcasing his diverse professional experience in the field.

Shadrack Wanjala Nasong’o, Ph.D. is Professor of International Studies and former department chair at Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee, where he has taught since 2005. He teaches courses in comparative politics, international relations, and African politics. He has previously taught at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, University of Nairobi, and Kenyatta University, both in Kenya. Additionally, Prof. Nasong’o has held prestigious summer fellowships at Riara University, Egerton University, and St. Paul’s University, all in Kenya. A political comparativist, Prof. Nasong’o’s research interest lies in the areas of democratization, identity politics, social conflict, governance, and development. He is author, editor, and co-editor of thirteen books, and dozens of peer reviewed book chapters and articles in refereed journals. His latest publication is a monograph titled Kenya and the Politics of a Postcolony (London: Anthem Press, 2024). For his prolific scholarly work, Prof. Nasong’o has been honored with the Rhodes College’s Clarence Day Award for Outstanding Research and Creative Activity, and the Ali Mazrui Award for Research and Scholarly Excellence from the University of Texas at Austin.