Experts on countries of origin by surname

Dr. Abduslam Zagud is a British-Libyan expert witness specialising in Arab socio-political affairs, Islamic law, tribal and community dynamics, and international human rights. He holds a doctorate in General International Law and brings over 17 years of combined academic, professional, and lived experience across the Arab world to his expert practice. Dr Zagud holds an intensive research experience on international public law, international human rights law, international relations and immigration law. 

As a Libyan national who has lived, studied, and worked across multiple Arab countries, and who maintains active community ties in the United Kingdom, Dr. Zagud occupies an unusual position among country experts: he shares the language, culture, religious traditions, and social frameworks of the people he writes about. This enables a depth of insight that goes beyond conventional desk research. Arab nationals speak candidly with him, update him on conditions on the ground, and provide the kind of nuanced, lived detail that is rarely accessible to an outside observer.

He is a Full Member of the SOAS Arbitration and Dispute Resolution Centre and holds Law Society accreditation as a Supervising Senior Caseworker in Immigration and Asylum Law. He works… Read more

Leah Zani, Ph.D. (she, ze, they) is a public anthropologist, author, and poet. Zani earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Irvine, where she studied the effects of air warfare in Laos. She trained as a researcher with the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, in partnership with the Nobel prize-winning Mines Advisory Group. She has presented her research in Laos to the United States Congress. Recently, she held the Human Rights Seat of the American Anthropological Association, where she advised leadership on global issues of academic freedom. Zani currently serves as a Scholar Rescue Fund Ambassador, assisting displaced scholars as they seek asylum in the United States. She has written for Cultural Anthropology, Kenyon Review, Consequence, and SAPIENS, among others. She is the author of Strike Patterns, winner of the 2023 IPPY Gold Prize for Creative Nonfiction.

Dr Leo Zeilig is a writer and researcher who has published extensively on African politics and society for more than twenty-five years. He is an editor of the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) and has written a range of books, reports and articles for a variety of organisations and audiences. 

Reuven (Ruvi) Ziegler is an Associate Professor in International Refugee Law and co-Chair of LGBTQIA+ staff network (University of Reading, UK). 

He is Associate Academic Fellow of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple; Research Associate, Refugee Studies Centre (Oxford); Editor, the Reporter, Society of Legal Scholars (UK & Ireland) and member of its Executive; Senior Research Associate, Refugee Law Initiative (Institute for Advanced Legal Study) and editor of its Working Paper Series; Co-Convenor, ‘Migration and Exclusion Under Constitutions’ Research Group, International Association of Constitutional Law; Visiting Professor (University of Johannesburg, Hebrew University). 

Dr. Tara Rava Zolnikov focuses on aspects of culture in a global health setting. Dr. Zolnikov earned a Ph.D in Developmental Science from North Dakota State University and an M.S. in Environmental Health from Harvard School of Public Health and a second M.S. in Industrial Hygiene from Montana Tech of the University of Montana and recently finished her third MS degree in Sport Psychology at North Central University and is expected to graduate in 2024. She also earned a B.S. degree in Biological Sciences from Montana Tech of the University of Montana.  She has been a professor of global health and environmental health for the last decade.  She also has chaired and been on committees in over 400 doctoral projects; to date, she has graduated over 150 PsyD’s under her guidance and tutelage. She was also recently accepted as a fellow of ultra elite The Explorer's Club. Dr. Zolnikov’s research primarily focuses on global health issues in low and middle-income countries, including Kenya, Ghana, India, Colombia, and Brazil. She has worked with the Kenya Red Cross on a variety of public health projects, ranging from infectious diseases (E.g. Ebola and HIV/AIDS) to access to water projects. She is primarily a qualitative researcher and concentrates on providing… Read more

Dr. Maggie Zraly is a medical and psychological anthropologist with extensive training in public health and mental health. Her research and practice have focused on conflict-affected populations, including survivors of conflict-related sexual violence/genocide-rape and GBV, youth heads of household, and children associated with armed forces and armed groups. Dr. Zraly conducted five years of in-depth fieldwork on the ground in Rwanda between 2003 and 2024. In 2016, she conducted short-term research in Afghanistan on human trafficking, and in 2017, she directed a center for mental health in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. She has completed short deployments for child protection and mental health support in emergency response, the longest of which was for 3 weeks in 2016 across Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, and Serbia to assess the protection situation of forcibly displaced Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi children seeking asylum.

Dr. Zvan Elliiott has studied Moroccan gender, family, and societal relationships, human rights and people’s access to them, as well as political and legal reforms since 2006. She has also published with reputable academic peer-reviewed publishers on these topics and has undertaken extensive sociological and anthropological field research in urban, provincial, and rural areas in Morocco. From 2012 until 2022, she lived, conducted research and was employed at a Moroccan university. She has a DPhil in Oriental Studies (2013) from the University of Oxford. From August 2012 to August 2018, she worked as an Assistant Professor of North African and Middle Eastern Studies at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco where she taught undergraduate and graduate courses on North African Politics, Middle East Politics, Gender and Politics in Modern Middle East, Gender in Society and Politics, and North Africa and the Middle East in the 20th Century. In September 2018, she was promoted to the Associate Professor rank. She was a founding and an active member of the on-campus No Violence Alliance (NoVA), a committee in charge of dealing with gender-based violence cases, such as bullying, violence against LGBTQI+, sexual harassment, and sexual assault. She has also supervised undergraduate… Read more