Experts on countries of origin by country

My expertise encompasses humanitarian affairs, public policy, migration, education, community resilience, religious and ethnic diversity, civil society development, international cooperation, and stakeholder engagement, with extensive knowledge of the social, political, economic, and cultural dynamics shaping emerging and developing regions. Through research, policy analysis, and community-focused initiatives, I have contrubted to advancing sustainable development, social inclusion, intercultural dialogue, institutional capacity building, and regional cooperation, while leading forthcoming research on governance reform, development partnerships, educational transformation, migration trends, and socioeconomic development.

Danielle Annoni is an associate professor of International Law and Human Rights at the Federal University of Parana (UFPR-Brazil), where she coordinates the Human Rights Observatory and Legal Practice in Human Rights and Migration. She has been conducting human rights research for 18 years. She is an educator, a mother and an active human rights defender, with a focus on migration, gender and the Latin American human rights protection system. Because of her work developed with vulnerable groups regarding the education of labor rights, the empowering of women through handicraft and gastronomy fairs, advocacy in the mediation of cultural conflicts, and access to justice and education, she has received several awards.

PhD in Social Science, sociologist and human rights expert specialising in country conditions analysis related to political violence, forced displacement, and asylum claims in Latin America. 

Simone Elyse Carter is a public health and humanitarian expert with over 15 years of experience in outbreak analytics, research coordination, and strategic leadership. She currently serves as the Lead for Integrated Outbreak Analytics (IOA) at UNICEF, providing technical guidance and capacity strengthening for emergency response efforts worldwide.

Throughout her career, Simone has played a key role in developing data-driven solutions for complex health crises, leading interdisciplinary teams, and fostering global partnerships. Her work has included chairing the IOA working group under the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) and overseeing systematic research dissemination to improve outbreak response strategies.

Previously, Simone managed the Integrated Analytics Cell (CAI) in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where she contributed to the development of evidence-based response mechanisms during public health emergencies. Her expertise spans epidemiology, humanitarian coordination, and policy development, making her a vital resource in advancing data-informed decision-making in crisis contexts.

Dr. Patrick Christian is a psychoanalytic anthropologist with a doctorate in the psychopathology of ethnic and cultural violence. He has spent the past 36 years conducting field research in Eurasia, Southwest Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, the Horn of Africa, the Central Sahel, the Andean Mountains, the Amazon Basin, and Mesoamerica, as part of military, diplomatic, and humanitarian interventions in violent intra-state conflicts. With the exceptions of India, Iran and Russia, Dr Christian has personally lived in and/or worked in each country he specialises in.

Dr. Christian is a member of the American Anthropological Association’s Society for Psychological Anthropology and the American Psychological Association’s Society for the Psychological Study of Culture, Ethnicity, Race, Conflict, and Violence.

Dr Christian’s work applies anthropology, psychology, and sociology to curate scientific understanding of specific subject communities’ lived-experiences – mentally and emotionally. His reporting illuminates the underlying psychosocial-emotional motivations behind individual and collective behaviour, both post-mortem and predictive of violent conflict.

Dr Christian’s field research focuses on civil-conflict… Read more

Patricia Foxen is a cultural anthropologist with 30 years of experience working in academic, policy and program contexts with Latino immigrant and refugee populations in the U.S. and Canada. She has written extensively about Central American migration and indigenous communities and is the author of the book In Search of Providence: Transnational Mayan Identities (Vanderbilt University Press, 2008; updated edition, 2020), as well as numerous peer-reviewed articles and major reports.  Dr. Foxen served for 14 years as Deputy Director of Research at UnidosUS (formerly the National Council of La Raza), the largest Latino civil rights and advocacy organization in the U.S., where she oversaw data-driven policy-oriented research, directed and published community-based research on the integration and well-being of Latino youth and families, and communicated findings to external audiences such as policy makers, media outlets, practitioners and universities. Dr. Foxen has taught at Vanderbilt University and the University of Toronto, has been a visiting fellow at Yale University and American University, and is a frequent guest lecturer. She has served on boards and advisory bodies including the Population Reference Bureau, Child Trends Hispanic Institute Advisory Council, the… Read more

I am a historian of twentieth century Central America who also works on contemporary Central American politics. I gained my PhD in Political Studies from the University of Aberdeen in 2014, with a thesis on Nicaragua’s Contra War. Prior to the PhD I worked for a number of NGOs, including Amnesty International's International Secretariat. I have spent several years living in Central America and my reports draw on extensive, up-to-date research covering press, civil society and human rights reports. I have completed numerous reports on Central American cases in recent years and my work is highly regarded. Clients have commented that I was highly recommended to them, and they describe my work as thorough, detailed, and carefully tailored to the appellant's specific circumstances. My reports have contributed to the reversal of Home Office decisions in a number of cases.

The expert is a seasoned International Analyst and Political Scientist, specializing in humanitarian disarmament, arms control, and criminal structures operating in the Latin America and Caribbean region, with extensive experience in NGOs in Argentina and Colombia. His research and academic endeavors are dedicated to addressing pressing issues in defense, security, and humanitarian efforts in the region.

I analyze emerging and developing markets focusing on how economic structures and institutions shape real outcomes. My work delivers practical insights on risk, growth, and structural constraints based on how these politics and economies actually function on the ground.

Dr. Harding earned a Ph.D. in International Studies from the University of Miami with specializations in Latin American Politics, Foreign Policy Analysis, and International Relations. His major professor and dissertation chair was the late Dr. Enrique Baloyra, a renowned Cuba-born scholar. Dr. Harding has held full-time academic appointments in Virginia, Alabama, and most recently Georgia, where he is the Professor of Political Science at Valdosta State University. He is the author of three books and several book chapters as well as over a dozen journal articles. Dr. Harding has been an invited presenter on Latin American politics in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia. He has been a federally recognized asylum expert since 2018, working for asylum attorneys throughout the United States as well as the UK and and the Netherlands.

Dr. Pacifico has been an international lawyer since 1993, with expertise in International Human Rights Law, particularly human rights of refugees and forced migrants, since 1997. She has been an associate professor for Law and International Relations at Maceio, Brasilia, and Joao Pessoa universities since 1997.  She has taught International Law/Relations, Human Rights, and Refugee and Migration Issues for more than two decades. Dr. Pacifico has also presented seminars, given lectures and interviews, published papers, supervised theses and dissertations on these issues, and my own research principally focuses on human rights of legal minorities and human rights protections of refugees and legal minorities in Brazil and abroad.

Currently, Dr. Pacifico is a full-time associate professor in International Relations at Paraiba State University and a full-time collaborator/researcher at the Post-Graduate Program in Comparative Studies on the Americas, at University of Brasilia, both in Brazil, in addition to being a Senior Research Associate at the Refugee Law Initiative at University of London, UK. She was a post-doctoral fellow at the York University Centre for Refugee Studies, Canada (2009 to 2010), visiting research fellow at the Refugee Studies… Read more

Dr. Rodney Reynolds is a Social and Medical Anthropologist with extensive academic, professional and field-based experience across Latin America and the Caribbean. He is fluent in Spanish and has lived and worked extensively within the region. His expertise focuses on the intersection of culture, health, social exclusion, vulnerability, and migration.

Dr. Sandoval-Cervantes is a cultural anthropologist from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. He is an UDLAP alum, and obtained his PhD from the University of Oregon in 2016. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). In the Spring 2022 semester, He will be a Visiting Research Fellow at the Animal Law and Policy Program at Harvard Law School where he will be working on his project “Dead Letter”: Animal Law, Activism, and Mexican Politics," which is part of a new research on the animal rights movement in urban Mexico. 

His research interests can be divided into two overlapping sub-fields. The first sub-field includes the anthropology of migration, particularly the analysis of internal and transnational migrations, gender (masculinity and femininity), indigeneity, kinship, and care. The second sub-field includes multi-species ethnography, legal anthropology and the anthropology of social movements, particularly through the study of activism and animal rights in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands.

My work has equipped me to evaluate country conditions through a disciplined framework that considers security, governance, community dynamics, institutional behavior, and vulnerability in combination, rather than in isolation. My expertise is especially relevant where a case turns on whether an individual could reasonably obtain protection, safely relocate, or avoid persecution, serious harm, reprisals, extortion, gang coercion, political targeting, gender-based violence, or reprisals linked to family or community structures. I assess, where relevant, whether state protection is available, effective, and accessible in practice; whether criminal or political actors can act with impunity or informal protection; whether relocation within the country would be realistic and durable; how local factors affect the risk profile of the individual concerned; and whether socio-economic, ethnic, political, or family-based vulnerabilities materially increase exposure to harm.

Samantha Serrano earned her Sc.D. in Collective Health from the Federal Medical School of São Paulo. Her research was the Bolivian immigrant women’s experiences in motherhood and family healthcare in São Paulo, Brazil. She has an M.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Her Master’s thesis was an institutional ethnography on the perceptions and treatments of the sexuality and sexual abuse of people with intellectual disabilities and mental illnesses in urban Guatemala. 

Samantha has multiple international and domestic publications and has conducted fieldwork in the United States, Guatemala and Brazil. Her areas of specialization include: the social determinants of health, health systems and policies, immigrant healthcare, intercultural healthcare, primary healthcare access, healthcare and disability, transnational motherhood, sexual violence, domestic violence, ethnography and qualitative research methods.

Karen S. Rotabi-Caseres is Professor of Social Work at California State University- Monterey Bay. She has extensive international experience, with an emphasis on Guatemala, El Salvador and Somalia. Her practice in these countries is oriented to child protection as well as violence against women. She has worked as an expert witness, mainly for Guatemala, but recent work in Somalia has expanded her area of expertise.  She has an extensive publication history, with an orientation to human rights.