Amena Mohsin is a Professor in the department of International Relations at the University of Dhaka. She graduated from the same department and later received her MA and PhD degrees from the University of Hawaii, USA and Cambridge University, UK. Amena has received several national and international fellowships, which include the East-West Center Graduate Fellowship, CIDA International Fellowship, Commonwealth Staff Fellowship, SSRC Fellowship and Freedom Foundation Fellowship. She has written extensively on rights issues, State, Democracy, Civil-Military relations and human security. She is the author of “The Politics of Nationalism: The Case of Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh” (UPL, 1997), “The Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh: On The Difficult Road To Peace” (Lynn Rienner Publishers, 2002), “Ethnic Minorities of Bangladesh: Some Reflections the Saontals and Rakhaines” (Programme for Research on Poverty Alleviation, 2002), “Women and Militancy: South Asian Complexities”, edited (with Imtiaz Ahmed), (Dhaka, University Press Limited. 2011), Conflict and Partition, CHT, Bangladesh, (with Delwar Hossain) SAGE, 2015)
Amya Agarwal is a PhD candidate enrolled in the Department of Political Science, University of Delhi. She worked as a Teaching Assistant in the same Department, where she taught International Relations for four years. Her PhD thesis is on ‘Gender Dimension of Conflict and its impact on Political Decision Making: A Case Study of varying roles of women in conflict in Kashmir.’ She has also done intensive research on Gender, Peace and Conflict. Her MPhil thesis is titled ‘Women Making Peace: A Case Study of the struggle for peace by the women in Manipur’. She worked as an intern with the Manipuri Women Gun Survivors Network (MWGSN), where she collected data and prepared reports on hundred testimonies of women gun survivors in Manipur. She has also been a part of research conducted by Institute for Research in India and International Studies (IRIIS) in various districts of Kashmir on Culture of Governance in Conflict. Three of her papers have been published in the Research Hunt Journal, namely, ‘Education and Women Empowerment’, ‘Pre Natal Sex Determination test and the Law in India’ and ‘Understanding Women Empowerment in Measurable Terms’. She also presented a paper on the Meira Paibis movement in 'Women in War' conference held in Sarajevo. Recently, her paper titled 'Peace as a Choice in Conflict: The Case of Meira Paibis, A Women’s Group in Manipur, North East India’ has been selected for being published in the second edition of the UN Women Journal on Gender Responsive Evaluations, 2014.
Anjoo Sharan Upadhyaya is a Professor of Political Science at the Banaras Hindu University. In her four decades long career, she served as the Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences, Chair, Department of Political Science and Director, Centre for the Study of Nepal and also an Adjunct Professor at Malaviya Centre for Peace Research.
She has done post-doctoral research at London School of Economics and Politics and Brown University and obtained an International Diploma from Uppsala University. In addition, Professor Upadhyaya has served as Scholar in Residence at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington DC, and Director (Research) at the Institute of Conflict Resolution and Ethnicity (INCORE), UU/ United Nations University, NI, U.K. More recently she served as the foundational ICCR Chair at Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu.
Professor Upadhyaya has published extensively both nationally and internationally on themes related to issues of self-determination, ethnicity, conflict, federalism, gender and development. She has taught and lectured on these issues widely at various universities in India and abroad, some of them being Concordia University, University of Toronto, Canada, Wellesley College CT, University of Maryland, MD, Stanford University, CI, International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), University of Brisbane, Darwin University, Australia, Karlstad University, Stockholm University, University of Lund, Sweden, Air Force Academy, Silver Spring, USA, Freie University, University of Magdeburg, Germany, and European University at Cracow, Poland and Dublin City University, Ireland.
Professor Anuradha M. Chenoy is the Dean, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has been chairperson and Area Studies Director in the Centre for Russian and Central Asian Studies earlier. She has written many books, monographs and articles in national, international journals. Besides her academic positions, she has done short term consultancies with organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross, UNESCO, Action Aid International, was a member of the Expert Group on Women Peace and Security of UN Women South Asia. She has evaluated the work of organizations like Focus on the Global South and the Asia Europe Peoples Forum. She has given lectures and interacted with UN Peacekeepers for the last 5 years. She has been an activist and engaged with many social movements and several civil society organizations.
(Professor Chenoy’s books include: The Maoist and Other Armed Conflicts, Penguin, 2010, [Co-authored with Kamal Mitra Chenoy ]; Human Security: Concept and Implications, 2006, Routledge, UK [Co-authored with Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh]; Militarism and Women in South Asia, Kali Books, New Delhi, 2002; The Making of New Russia, Har Anand Publishers, New Delhi, 2001; “Countering Militarization, Building Peace: The Intersectionality of SCR1325 and the Responsibility to Protect.” (2011) She has written many articles and edited books.
Arshi Javaid is pursuing her doctoral research at the Centre for South Asian Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. She has done her Masters in Political Science from Jamia Millia Islamia. She submitted her M.Phil. Dissertation titled “Role of women in Peace-building in Kashmir-From 1989-2014”. Her research of interests are gender and conflict, peace studies, militant movements in South Asia.
Ms. Diksha Poddar is pursuing her Masters’ in Philosophy (MPhil) at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi from Centre of South Asian Studies, School of International Studies. Simultaneously, she is doing a Diploma in International Law and Diplomacy from Indian Society of International Law. Ms. Poddar has completed her Masters’ degree in Development Studies from Ambedkar University in 2014. Apart from this, she has studied a Post-Graduate Diploma course in Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding at Lady Sri Ram College. As a part of the Masters’, she has completed a dissertation on ‘Identity & stereotypes: Talking about youth from Kashmir & Delhi’. Presently, she is leading a youth project -The Multi-Stakeholder Engagement Initiative (TMSEI). Diksha has worked as an intern at Gujarat Institute of Development Research, Ahmedabad and Centre for Equity Studies, New Delhi. She was honored with the Prakriti Shree Award for environmental consciousness in college and was the Ambassador of Delhi for the Green Karbon Biodiversity Camp.
Fazeeha Azmi, is a senior lecturer in Geography at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka with a background in Geography, development studies, and Gender studies. She did her undergraduates studies in Geography at the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka. She completed her M.Phil. in Social Change (Development Studies) and Ph.D., in Geography at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Norway. She is teaching and supervising undergraduate and postgraduate students in human geography, gender and women studies. She has been involved in collaborative and individual research projects in Sri Lanka. Her research interests are geography and development, gender and development, development induced displacement, post-war recovery, youth and development and women’s empowerment. She is currently a member of the board of directors at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (Sri Lanka).
Ganesha Somayaji is a Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology, Goa University, India. Earlier he worked as a lecturer in Sociology in M.E.S. College of Arts and Commerce Zuarinagar from 1988 to 1999. He received his Ph. D. degree for his thesis on the occupational mobility of the Udupi Hoteliers in Goa from the Goa University in 1997 and M.A. in Sociology with first rank and gold medals from the University of Mysore in 1987. He is the Academic Coordinator of the Study India Programme (SIP) for the Nihon University students in Goa University for the last eight years. He visited Nihon University, Japan in the month of October 2012 as a Visiting Professor. In the year 2013 he visited Indonesia in connection with an international conference organized by the One Asia Foundation, Japan. Enterprise in food, migration, developmental issues, and sociology of language are Prof. Somayaji’s current research interests. So far Prof. Somayaji has edited four books. Six Ph. D. Students have completed their doctoral studies under his guidance.
Imtiaz Ahmed is a Professor in the department of International Relations at the University of Dhaka. Professor Ahmed was educated at Carlton University, Ottawa Canada, and Australian National University, Canberra. He has served as the Chairperson of the Department of International Relations, University of Dhaka (2000-2003) and has been the visiting Professor at Yokohama City University Japan Sagesse University, Beirut. He is the recipient of various awards and honours. Notable among them are the SSRC Award on International Conflict Zones, Social Science Research Council New York (2002); Honorary Citizenship, the State of Maryland, USA (1993). He has authored, co-authored, or edited 16 books and 6 monographs. More than 98 research papers and scholarly articles have been published in leading journals and chapters in edited volumes. His most recent publications are Historicizing 1971 Genocide: State versus Person (Dhaka: University Press Limited, 2009) and a co-edited volume on Women & Militancy: South Asian Complexities (Dhaka: University Press Limited, 2011). His forthcoming book is a co-edited volume titled: Contemporarising Tagore and the World (Dhaka: University Press Limited).
Ivy Dhar is Assistant Professor of Development Studies at Ambedkar University, Delhi (AUD) and a Ph.D in Political Science from Jawaharlal Nehru University. She was a Junior Fellow in Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) and has worked on a UKIERI- British Council commissioned research project on education. Her research interests include gender and conflict, identity and resistance studies, resource politics, and culture, development and politics of North-east India. She has recently concluded a research project on cross cultural creation of Khasi women attires funded by AUD which she has been working as a chapter in a forthcoming book. Her publication includes ‘Assam through the Prism of Reorganisation Experience’ in Interrogating States Reorganization: Culture, Identity and Politics in Contemporary India (2011).
Jacky Sutton is a research scholar at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University. Her thesis topic is the impact of international law and transnational feminism on women’s agency in Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly in the media. Jacky has spent the last two decades working for the United Nations and international NGOs in conflict-affected countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, primarily on election, internet law and freedom of expression. Jacky has an LLM in International Information Technology law, focusing on the development of regulatory frameworks for internet, media and telecoms in Iraq, and an MA in Constitutional Law, focusing on the impact of Native Canadian civil society on constitutional change in Canada. In Australia Jacky is a Women, Peace and Security Academic Collective and is currently involved in a civil society working group on the Mid-Term Review of the Australian National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security. She is also Senior Legal Advisor for the Institute of War and Peace Reporting in Iraq, where the government is seeking to reform the legal framework for public service broadcasting and internet, and has been contracted by UN Women Afghanistan to support the development of an advocacy strategy around Violence Against Women.
Joanna Coelho is a Senior Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, Goa University, India. She completed her Ph.D. and M.A. in Sociology from same university in 2010 and 2003 respectively. Her PhD thesis was entitled ‘Language and the Public Sphere: A Sociological Study of the Konkani language movement in Goa since 1987’. She was awarded the P.R. Dubashi Award by Goa University for securing the highest marks in Social Sciences at the M.A. level for the academic year 2002-2003. Her research interests include diaspora and migration on account of armed conflict. She is especially interested in understanding various aspects pertaining to Tibetan refugees in India. She has visited Tibetan settlements in various parts of India, apart from also visiting the Tibetan settlement in Toronto, Canada. She is currently working on an ICSSR - sponsored research project entitled ‘Constructing Nation in the Diaspora: Political Sociological Study of Tibetan Refugees in Bylakuppe Settlements, South India’. Her paper presentations and research publications mainly focus on language movements as well as the status of Tibetan refugees in India.
From her earliest memories Luna K. C. has viewed the world with a sense of possibility and a desire to make a difference. Her skills and interests qualify her to make this difference through development, advocacy and research. For the first time, She was engaged in the field of advocacy and development at Swarnim Academy for Community Development as a Program Coordinator from 2002 till 2004. Here, she worked with women groups and youth clubs for improving their livelihoods through access to water and sanitation facilities in rural areas of Nepal where clean water and basic sanitation is still a big taboo. Then, to broaden her experience she worked at Plan Nepal as an Institutional Learning and Documentation Officer from 2005 till 2007 where she was involved in research and capacity strengthening of women and children victims of trafficking, domestic violence and armed conflict. From June 2007 till August 2009, she worked as a Resettlement Specialist (gender and resettlement) with the Decentralized Rural Infrastructure and Livelihood Project (DRILP), Swiss Development Cooperation; here, she worked to improve the livelihoods of the people affected by infrastructure intervention through designing livelihood restoration programs, capacity building and advocacy. Currently, she is a PhD scholar at Humanitarian Aid and Reconstruction Chair Group, Wageningen University, the Netherlands. Her PhD investigates Changing Gender Roles, Women, Livelihoods and Post Conflict in Nepal. He completed her Master Degree in International Development Studies also from Wageningen University. Her research interests are women, gender, livelihoods security, conflict and post conflict and transnational issues.
Meenakshi Gopinath is Founder and Director of WISCOMP (Women in Security, Conflict Management and Peace), an initiative that seeks to promote the leadership of South Asian women in the areas of peace, security and regional cooperation. She is also Mentor of Lady Shri Ram College, New Delhi. She was the first woman to serve as member of the National Security Advisory Board (NSAB) of India.
Dr. Gopinath is a member of multi-track peace initiatives in Kashmir and between India and Pakistan including the Neemrana Peace Initiative and the Pakistan India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy. She has authored among others Pakistan in Transition, and co-authored Conflict Resolution – Trends and Prospects, Transcending Conflict: A Resource book on Conflict Transformation and Dialogic Engagement and has contributed chapters and articles in several books and journals on Gandhi, the politics of Pakistan, the arts Conflict Resolution, Gender and Peace Building et al. Her interests include issues of human rights and gender, conflict transformation and Buddhist and Gandhian philosophy. In recognition of her contribution to the field of women’s education and empowerment, she has received several awards including the Padma Shri Award, Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi Award, the Rajiv Gandhi Award for Excellence in Education and the Mahila Shiromani Award and the Delhi Citizen Forum Award and Qimpro Platinum Standard Award for Education and Celebrating Womanhood South Asian Recognition Award for Social Harmony and International Lifetime Achievement Award – 2009 for outstanding work in the field of justice, Equity, Peace and Progress and the L.M. Singhvi fellowship Award at the David Davies Memorial Institute of International Studies (DDMI), University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Award of Honorary Doctorate Degree for significant contribution to the education of women and the commitment to fostering global peace through Conflict Resolution, La Trobe University, Australia and Honorary Adjunct Professor, La Trobe Asia, La Trobe University, Australia
Dr. Gopinath serves on the Governing Boards of research institutes, NGOs, educational institutions and Corporate bodies. She also is a member of The Club of Rome, member of the UGC, the Indo German Consultative Group and Track Two initiatives in the South Asian region. She has been a Fulbright scholar and has received several fellowships including the Australian International Education Foundation Fellowship (1996-97) and the University Grants Commission Indo-Israel Exchange Fellowship (1994-1996) among others.
Mohammad Rafi Yousufzai has completed his B.A. in Law and political science from Karwan University Kabul, Afghanistan. He has five years of research, monitoring and evaluation experience along with two years on human resources and administration experience. He also has six years of experience in working and supporting youth organization and civil societies as volunteer.
Pamela Philipose, who began her career with The Times of India, is currently a senior fellow with the Indian Council of Social Science Research. Until June 2014, she was director and editor-in-chief of Women's Feature Service (WFS), an agency mandated to highlight development issues with a gender focus in media coverage. Earlier, she was senior associate editor with The Indian Express, anchoring the edit page and writing commentary on a range of issues, including those of conflict, gender, politics and development. The Indian Express ran her satirical column, ‘Straight Face’, for ten years and she authored a book of political satire for Penguin India entitled ‘Laugh All The Way To The Vote Bank’. She was awarded the Chameli Devi Jain Award for Outstanding Woman Journalist in 1999 and the Zee-Astitva Award for Constructive Journalism in 2007. She was also an advisor to the Media Task Force of the Government of India’s High Level Status of Women Committee Report. Among the volumes she has coedited is one focusing on women and conflict -- 'Across the Crossfire: Women and Conflict in India', brought out by Women Unlimited in 2012.
Ms. Patricia Barandun is a Deputy Representative of UN Women Office for India, Bhutan, Maldives and Sri Lanka. She holds an MA in International Relations from the Graduate Institute of International Studies (Geneva, Switzerland). Patricia brings with her fourteen years of experience as a development practitioner. Ms. Barandun joined UN Women’s multi-country office as Deputy Representative in June 2014. She is married and has one son.
Rachna Chaudhary has trained as a Political Scientist and her doctoral work is in the area of Feminist Criminology and Feminist Jurisprudence. Presently, she is teaching Gender Studies at Ambedkar University, Delhi. She has been working on questions of sexism in legal discourse, masculinity and sexuality studies.
Radhika Hettiarachchi is a development practitioner and researcher working on socio- economic Stability, conflict transformation and peacebuilding. She has worked on tsunami recovery with the United Nations Development Programme and peacebuilding through business, ‘peaconomics’, with International Alert. She currently coordinates a collective of development practitioners working on innovative approaches to post-war development at Development Strategies Group.
She is involved in the Arts in Sri Lanka as a means of creating space for civil society discourses. She was the curator of Colomboscope, which focused on tackling issues of history, representation and politics through various forms of art. She is on the Artistic Advisory Board of the Colombo Art Biennale and is currently curating a public art project for British Council. Most recently, she exhibited the ‘Herstories’ project locally and in England, Canada and Afghanistan. Designed and conducted by her, the project is a collection of oral histories of war affected women from Sri Lanka that is now a part of the National Archives of Sri Lanka as its first women’s oral history collection. Surrogate copies are also housed in the Library of Congress Washington and the Women’s Library in London U.K.
She read English and Communications at York University, Toronto and holds an MSc in Development Management from London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), U.K.
Rajen Harshe is a Visiting Professor in the Department of International Relations at the South Asian University New Delhi. He was the first Vice Chancellor of the University of Allahabad after it became a central university (2005-10). Currently, he is the President of G.B. Pant Social Science Institute of Allahabad.
A Ph. D. from Jawaharlal Nehru University (J.N.U.) he did part of his doctoral work at the Fondation Nationale Des Sciences Politiques of Paris on a French Government Fellowship (1973-75). He was a Fulbright scholar at Columbia University, New York (1985-86) where he did his post-doctoral research. As a part of the Indian delegation of Vice Chancellors he visited the U.S.A. on International Visitors’ Leadership Program (IVLP) in September 2007. Prof. Harshe has travelled quite widely on important assignments as member /leader of national delegations or a visiting scholar in several countries. He was the President of the African Studies Association of India (2005-11), sectional President of the Indian History Congress for the year 2009-10, President of the Indian Congress of Asian and Pacific Studies (2009-10) and Editor in Chief of Africa Review (2006-12). He has received several honours, including Honorary Colonel (2007), Fergusson Gaurav Award (2007) and Amity Academic Excellence Award (2008) etc. Apart from several books, including a pioneering study entitled Twentieth Century Imperialism: Shifting Contours and Changing Conceptions, he has to his credit over eighty articles in prestigious anthologies and academic journals.Dr. Harshe has been associated, in different capacities, with several premier academic institutions as well as the Ministry of External Affairs and Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, the World Bank, the erstwhile Planning Commission of India, the National Knowledge Commission, the Ford Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, the European Commission, the University Grants Commission, the Indian Council of Social Science Research and the National Assessment and Accreditation Council.
Rajeshwari Balasubramanian is an independent researcher with a doctoral degree from Centre for Political Studies, JNU. For her doctoral research, she has worked on Communal Riots, State Accountability and Issues of Justice: A Study of Post-Riot Judicial Inquiry Commissions. She has worked as an Associate Consultant with Child Rights and You (CRY, India). She was awarded the National Child Rights Research Fellowship by CRY in 2006 to work on Pedagogy and Construction of Communal Identity in Children. She was also awarded the Mahbub-ul-Haq grant for collaborative research on Right-wing Extremism in India and Pakistan: The case of Shiv Sena and Jamait-i-Islami. Prior to her engagement with CRY, she worked as a consultant with Women in Security Conflict Management and Peace (WISCOMP), New Delhi.
Rebecca Reichmann Tavares is the Representative of UN Women’s Multicounty Office for India, Bhutan, the Maldives and Sri Lanka. Previously Dr. Reichmann Tavares was Representative for Brazil and Regional Programme Director of UN Women’s Brazil & Southern Cone Office (2009-2013). A native of Southern California, Dr. Reichmann Tavares graduated from Yale University and holds a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has published several books, monographs and articles on race relations in Brazil, women’s rights, and microfinance in Latin America.
Róisín Burke is currently an Irish Research Council postdoctoral research fellow based at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland Galway. She was awarded funding from 2014 to October 2015 by the Irish Research Council to conduct a project on rule of law programming in transitional states, gender justice and women’s legal empowerment. She will continue work on this project while in residence at RegNet. Dr Burke is an Attorney at Law in New York State. She completed a doctorate at the Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law, University of Melbourne Law School in 2012. Her thesis was titled ‘Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by UN Military Contingents: Moving Beyond the Current Status Quo and Responsibility under International Law'. She holds a LLB in Law from the University of Limerick and an LLM in International Human Rights Law from the Irish Centre for Human Rights.
Her research interests are in the areas of international criminal law, peace operations, rule of law, gender justice and public international law.
Shelly Pandey is a Junior Fellow at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Teen Murti, Delhi. Prior to this, she was a Research Fellow at Women's Studies and Development Centre, University of Delhi. Her PhD is from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi on gendered experiences of globalized work world in India. Her research interests include interdisciplinary approach to study gender, urban spaces, globalization, ICT and work. She is the recipient of M. N. Srinivas Memorial Prize 2012 awarded by Indian Sociological Society for her paper 'Private space in public transport: locating gender in Delhi Metro,' published in Economic and Political Weekly.
Shweta Singh is an Assistant Professor, in the Department of International Relations, South Asian University (SAU). Prior to SAU she taught for nearly a decade at Aung San Suu Kyi Centre for Peace, Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi. She was also a Fellow at National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Otago, New Zealand and is the recipient of the prestigious United States, Department of State, International Leadership Award in 2010 and Mahbub Ul Haq Award in 2013. She has done her specialized training in Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding from Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, Virginia, United States of America.Her research focuses on Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding (particularly interventions designs and conflict assessment tools), Mediation and Armed Conflicts in South Asia (specifically Sri Lanka and Kashmir) and Gender, Conflict & Security. She also has a strong interest in the politics of Pedagogy and has particularly contributed towards designing pedagogical and assessment tools for Education for Peace in areas of protracted conflict.
She has published in the field of Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding and attempts to foreground a South Asian lens in theory and praxis. Her most recent publication (2015) is the monograph (co-authored with Marie Nissanka): Connectors and Dividers: Prospects and Challenges for Conflict Transformation in Kashmir and Sri Lanka, Regional Centre for Strategic Studies, Colombo: RCSS. She also works/consults extensively in the field, and is regularly invited by National and International Universities/think tanks like University of Peace (Costa Rica) Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (Geneva), Duta Wancana & Gadjah Madah University, (Yogyakarta), KAICIID (Vienna), WISCOMP(New Delhi), Peacebuilding Training and Education for SAARC Emerging Leaders (Kathmandu) to conduct workshops, lectures and trainings on various aspects of Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding.
Siddharth Mallavarapu is currently Associate Professor and Chairperson, Department of International Relations at the South Asian University (on deputation from the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University). His prior publications include a single author book titled Banning the Bomb: The Politics of Norm Creation, two co-edited books (with Kanti Bajpai) on International Relations in India and another (with B.S.Chimni) titled International Relations: Perspectives for the Global South besides other journal contributions. His research interests include disciplinary histories of International Relations, the politics and episteme of the global south, the theory and practice of global governance and evaluations of both mainstream and critical approaches to the study of world politics. He has also been featured in February 2014 on Theory Talks
Siddharth Singh has done his M.A. in English Literature from the University of Delhi. He is a theatre person and a social activist. He has worked and volunteered in the development sector on issues related to children, sexuality, health, adult education and agriculture among others.
Smita Mitra a post-graduate in Social Science from Tata Institute of Social Sciences and is currently working with UN Women Office for India, Bhutan, the Maldives and Sri Lanka on Women Peace and Security. She brings in twelve plus years of experience working with National and International organizations and NGOs on Human Rights, Governance and Peace and Security. She has designed and led the UN Women South Asia program on Women Count for Peace. She specializes in security sector reform on pre-deployment training of Military Observers on sexual violence in armed conflict. She has worked in Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka on young people, maternal and child health and gender responsive reconciliation and peacebuilding.
Soumita Basu is Assistant Professor of International Relations at the South Asian University, New Delhi. Her primary areas of research are the United Nations, feminist International Relations, and critical security studies. Prior to joining SAU, Soumita held the Hayward R. Alker and Mellon postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Southern California and Kenyon College respectively. She has also worked with Women in Security, Conflict Management and Peace (WISCOMP) in New Delhi and Kashmir, and the PeaceWomen project of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in New York. Soumita has published on gender, security and the UN in edited volumes as well as International Studies Perspectives and the International Studies Compendium. The UN Security Council resolution 1325 has been central to this research agenda. Soumita has been part of the editorial team of the International Feminist Journal of Politics since 2011, and currently serves as an Associate Editor of the journal.
Sujeet Karn is working as a visiting lecturer in the Social Work Programme at the Centre for Nepal and Asian Studies (CNAS), Tribhuban University, Nepal. He has obtained his Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the University of Hull in 2013. In his Ph.D. thesis, He discussed the Maoists conflict and political violence induced death and bereavement in Nepal. And since then he has been continuing working on Nepal and India as independent researcher. His research focuses on anthropology of violence, death and bereavement, borderland livelihoods and security in South Asia and everyday religion in the Himalayas.
In the past he has also worked as a consultant for various national and international non-governmental organizations including, DFID, ILO, Save the Children and has written simultaneously on various social issues in National daily in Nepal.
Yasmin Sooka is the Executive Director of the Foundation for Human Rights in South Africa. She is a leading human rights lawyer and activist as well as an international expert in the field of Transitional Justice, gender and international war crimes following her work on investigating war crimes in Sri Lanka and her report on post-conflict sexual violence.
From 1995 Ms Sooka served on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission as the Deputy Chair of the Human Rights Violations Committee and was responsible for the final report, delivered in March 2003. She also chaired the Commission’s legal sub-committee. Between 2002 - 2004 she was one of three appointed international Commissioners to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Sierra Leone. Her responsibilities included policy and operational development as well as planning and writing the final report. She played a key role in developing the link between gender justice and transitional justice. In July 2010, Ms Sooka was appointed to the three- member Panel of Experts advising the Secretary General on accountability for war crimes committed during the final stages of the war in Sri Lanka. The report was published in May 2011. Ms Sooka has published two additional reports on Sri Lanka in 2014. She is the co-author of The Unfinished War: Torture and Sexual Violence in Sri Lanka: 2009-2014 with the Bar Human Rights Committee of England and Wales and the International Truth and Justice Project, Sri Lanka. Ms Sooka is also the co-author of an interactive report; Five Years On: The White Flag Incident 2009-2014, with the International Truth and Justice Project, Sri Lanka. In March 2014, Ms Sooka co-authored the African Union’s Policy on Transitional Justice. She has assisted the Governments of Ghana, Liberia and Timor-Leste in setting up transitional bodies such as Truth Commissions. She has also consulted widely to the United Nations on Transitional Justice in Afghanistan, Burundi, Kenya, Nepal and Uganda. She consults regularly for the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs in Switzerland, and has participated in several missions including to Libya and Tunisia.
Ms Sooka consults for the various bodies of the United Nations on a variety of issues including Governance and the Post-2015 Development Agenda, and International Commissions of Inquiry and Fact-finding Missions on Violations of International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, She is also a member of the Advisory Panel on the review of Resolution 1325.