Experts on countries of origin by country

A Middle East specialist, Riad trains, advises, lectures, and researches such topics as Business, Politics, and Migration, inter alia, publishing on them and others, as well as making media contributions. He holds a High School Diploma from l’École internationale de Genève; a BA from the American University of Beirut, Faculty of Arts and Sciences; and an MLitt from the University of Oxford, Faculty of Social Studies. Among other present positions he is Country of Origin Information expert for the Fahamu Refugee Program, Oxford; Special Advisor to the Global Challenges Forum, Geneva; and board associate, SUNSGLOW Global Training in the Rule of Law, New York City. He is fluent in Arabic and English, with a strong knowledge of French. 

Sergen Bahceci is a political anthropologist who examines violence and its role in constituting everyday life and lived experiences. He completed a PhD in Anthropology at LSE in 2023. For his doctoral research, he conducted 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in northern Cyprus among elderly war veterans and younger generations of Cypriots who were born after the island’s civil war (1955 - 1974).

Following his PhD, he worked as a researcher at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Criminology where he was employed to conduct digital ethnographic fieldwork in Macclesfield, England, on everyday experiences of crime-related insecurity. He previously taught anthropology at Goldsmiths and University College London, and also worked for the UN Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus in 2020. He has also provided a COI expert witness report for a deportation order appeal tribunal. 

Ibrahim Bangura has worked extensively in the fields of Transitional Justice, Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration of Ex-Combatants, Security Sector Reform, Sustainable Livelihoods, Gender and Conflict Resolution in Africa.

He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and History and a Master’s degree in Gender Studies from University of Sierra Leone; another Master’s degree in International Development Studies from the University of Amsterdam; and a Doctorate degree in Economics from the Leipzig Graduate School of Management in Germany.

He currently lectures at the Peace and Conflict Studies Programme, Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone, and he is also a senior partner at Transition International, a consultancy firm based in the Netherlands.