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. 

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

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.

Lirio Gutiérrez Rivera is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, Universidad Nacional de Colombia (National University of Colombia)​. She studied political science (Freie Universität Berlin) and anthropology (Universidad de los Andes- Colombia). ​​Her research includes urban violence, contemporary prisons, youth and street gangs, gender and urban planning, community leaders, and state responses to crime and violence in Latin America, particularly Honduras and Colombia.​ Her research has been funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Latin American Council for Social Research. Her book, Territories of Violence. State, Marginal Youth, and Public Security, was published in 2013 with Palgrave. She is currently working on her second book on women community leaders and high risk urban contexts in Colombia.

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.

The Expert has expertise on forced displacement and migration in Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean and the links with gang violence, organised crime and corruption in the region. For the last fifteen years they have conducted academic and professional research on migration and internal displacement linked to violence, criminal groups and impunity in Central America and Mexico and on human trafficking in the broader region of Latin America and Caribbean, making several fieldwork trips and authoring NGOs reports and academic articles. They also have expertise in gender issues in the region, including gender-based violence, LGBTQ+ discrimination and hate crimes, and access to abortion and reproductive rights, including judicial persecution related to this.

The expert has ten years of experience writing expert witness reports for dozens of cases in the United Kingdom asylum system, with numerous judges commenting in determinations on how useful, relevant and comprehensive their reports are in informing decisions.

Jordan Levy is a sociocultural anthropologist with a research program focused on state formation, political culture, and out-migration in Honduras. He has been studying Honduras and conducting non-governmental (NGO) work in the country since 2001. He was present during the 2009 military coup, and has since studied how these events polarized Honduran society and have increased different forms of violence.

Dr. Levy’s doctoral dissertation focused on the political activism of schoolteachers and post-coup policies of governance. He has conducted expensive ethnographic research in Tegucigalpa and the Honduran South, through which he has learned about Hondurans’ experiences with gang-related violence, gender-based violence, and the persecution of political activists. At DePaul University (Chicago) he teaches a variety of courses for the Anthropology major, is an affiliated faculty member of the Latin American & Latino Studies program, and serves on the DePaul Migration Collaborative advisory council.

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.   

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. 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.