Ward Berenschot is a postdoctoral researcher at KITLV researching local democracy, clientelism, and identity politics in India and Indonesia. Berenschot studied political science at the University of Amsterdam, where he also obtained his PhD cum laude with a dissertation on Hindu–Muslim violence in India. As a lecturer in conflict studies, he taught courses on political violence, ethnic conflict, and conflict transformation. He has managed a collaborative research project with the UNDP and the World Bank on access to justice in Indonesia, and he has worked with the Open Society Institute as well as Dutch development agencies on civil society building and legal aid. Berenschot is the author of Riot Politics: India’s Hindu–Muslim Violence and the Everyday Mediation of the State (2011) and several other publications on ethnic violence, public service delivery, and access to justice. At KITLV Berenschot also coordinates the KNAW-SPIN research program “From Clients to Citizens? Emerging Citizenship in Democratizing Indonesia.” His book on Indonesia’s patronage democracy, Democracy for Sale: Clientelism, Elections and the State in Indonesia (coauthored with Edward Aspinall), will appear in the fall of 2018.

Lyttelton Braima is a Rotary World Peace Fellow from the Duke-UNC Rotary Peace Center. As a policy-oriented researcher, he has spent the past fifteen years on research and development practice, using research outcomes to advocate and effect public policy to improve the lives of marginalized communities. Before joining the World Bank Justice for the Poor program from 2008 to 2013, Braima worked for Care International’s Rights-Based Approach (RBA) program in Sierra Leone, designing and implementing initiatives to rebuild community governance and justice systems after the civil conflict. His expertise includes participatory research methods and program evaluation. He is skilled in a number of key policy spheres, particularly governance, justice, health, mining, food security, and social accountability.

Peter Chapman is a senior policy officer working on law and development with the Open Society Justice Initiative. He has a particular focus on legal empowerment and community-based justice services. Prior to joining the Justice Initiative, Chapman worked on governance and justice reform in East Asia and Africa with the World Bank’s Justice for the Poor program, with the Carter Center in Liberia, and with the Public International Law and Policy Group in Uganda and Washington, DC. He has authored publications on law and development for a variety of audiences. Chapman holds a JD from the Washington College of Law, American University; an MA in international affairs from the School of International Service, American University; and a BA in political science and peace studies from Colgate University.

Maria Roda Cisnero is the Asia Foundations Philippines project officer for the Law and Human Rights Unit. In her role for the Child Protection against Online Sexual Abuse and Exploitation Project, she supports the implementation of the two-year project with the Australian Embassy and UNICEF. An alternative lawyer by vocation, Cisnero is honing her expertise on computer-facilitated crimes against children, child protection, and policy reform. Cisnero served as a national advocacy director of International Justice Mission Philippines (IJM) from 2011 until joining the Foundation in 2015. Prior to her work at IJM, she worked for the Legal Assistance Center for Indigenous Filipinos and Tanggol Kalikasan. She is a product of the developmental law internship program of the Ateneo Human Rights Center, LRC KsK Friends of the Earth Philippines and Environmental Legal Assistance Center (ELAC). Cisnero received her BA in broadcast communication from the University of the Philippines, Diliman; her JD from Ateneo De Manila University; and her MA in development studies, social justice perspectives from Erasmus University–ISS.

Katherine Drage is a qualifying attorney with Withers LLP (London) where she has a broad civil litigation practice and serves as the firm’s pro bono coordinator for the UK Solicitors Pro Bono Group. Drage was a litigation and research intern at SERI from July 2010 to July 2011. She has a diverse interest in international human rights law, and especially in education and the promotion of access to justice and the uptake of rights-based litigation. She holds a master of arts degree in English from Cambridge University; a bachelor of laws degree (First) from BPP Law School, London; and an LLM degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Drage has completed her Legal Practitioner’s Course with distinction and received her Solicitor’s Training Contract.

Jackie Dugard is an associate professor at the School of Law, University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), where she teaches property law and jurisprudence. In January 2010 Dugard cofounded and (between January 2010 and December 2012) was the first executive director of the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI), where she is now the chairperson of SERI’s board of directors. Prior to founding SERI, between 2004 and 2009, she was a senior researcher at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) at the University of the Witwatersrand. In February 2014 Dugard established the Gender Equity Office (GEO) at the University of the Witwatersrand to deal holistically with gender-based harm, which she directed until December 2016. Dugard’s areas of expertise are socioeconomic rights, socio-legal studies, land and property rights, and access to basic services and justice for the poor. She has a BA (Hons) in African politics and an LLB from the University of the Witwatersrand, an MPhil in the sociology and politics of development and a PhD in social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge, and an LLM in international human rights law from the University of Essex.

Jennifer Franco is a senior researcher at the Transnational Institute (TNI) based in Amsterdam, where she is part of the Agrarian and Environmental Justice team and the Myanmar in Focus team. Her research interests are mainly in the realm of action research with rural social movements and grassroots organizations in relation to claiming rights to land and territory. Prior to joining TNI she worked with local peasants’ movements in the Philippines in support of their struggles for right to land and territory, human rights, and social justice. She received a PhD in politics from Brandeis University in the late 1990s and wrote a doctoral dissertation on the impact of less-than-democratic elections on regime transition and democratization in the Philippines. Since 2012 she has been working with local civil society organizations and communities in Myanmar in support of democratization of land access and control.

Varun Gauri is a senior economist in the Development Economics Vice Presidency of the World Bank. He co-leads the Mind, Behavior, and Development Unit (eMBeD), which integrates behavioral science into the design of antipoverty policies worldwide. He serves on the editorial board of the journals Behavioral Public Policy and Health and Human Rights, and is a member of the World Economic Forum Council on Behavior, the advisory board of Academics Stand against Poverty, and the board of the Behavioral Economics Action Research Centre at the University of Toronto. His research has appeared in journals spanning the fields of economics, philosophy, political science, and law, and has been covered in the New York Times, the Economist, the Washington Post, Forbes, the Hindu, and Frontline, among many media outlets. He has published three books: Courting Social Justice, School Choice in Chile, and Bringing Law to Life. His current research is investigating the influence of social norms on women’s economic decision-making, compliance with judicial human rights orders, and the influence of cooperation and identity on ideas of distributive justice. He has a BA from the University of Chicago and a PhD from Princeton University, and has held positions as a visiting lecturer in public and international affairs at Princeton University, the Withrow Chair at Deep Springs College, and a visiting professor in the Department of Economics at ILADES in Santiago, Chile.

Gibrill Jalloh is a 2014 Mason Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. He worked for the World Bank Justice for the Poor program in Sierra Leone from 2006 to 2013. His work was focused on understanding “context” in the design and execution of development interventions. His work has used social accountability and legal empowerment approaches to advance local-level justice and improve social service delivery outcomes in suburban and rural Sierra Leone; this involves researching, designing, testing, evaluating, and informing mainstream development interventions. He is also a pioneer of the case-tracking method in the evaluation of social justice interventions. Prior to joining the World Bank, he was an environmental advocate and worked with a consortium of environmental NGOs to preserve protected areas in Sierra Leone and across the border. He holds an MA in public administration from the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard, and a BSc in environment science from Njala University.

Vivek Maru started Namati in 2011 to grow the movement for legal empowerment around the world. Namati and its partners have built cadres of grassroots legal advocates – also known as “community paralegals” – in eight countries. The advocates have worked with more than 65,000 people to protect community lands, enforce environmental law, and secure basic rights to health care and citizenship. Namati convenes the Global Legal Empowerment Network, made up of more than 1,500 groups from 130 countries who are learning from one another and collaborating on common challenges. Vivek was named a Social Entrepreneur of the Year by the World Economic Forum, a “legal rebel” by the American Bar Association, and an Ashoka Fellow. He, Namati, and the Global Legal Empowerment Network received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2016.

H. Abigail Moy is the director of the Global Legal Empowerment Network, convened by Namati. Since Namati’s earliest days, she has led efforts to build a thriving global movement for legal empowerment, one capable of innovating boldly and collectively tackling the greatest justice challenges of our time. The Global Legal Empowerment Network works to achieve this vision by connecting, strengthening, and expanding the number of community paralegals around the world. Prior to joining Namati, Abigail worked with access to justice programs in Africa, Latin America, and South Asia, in cooperation with the World Bank, the Asia Foundation, Fundacion Soros-Guatemala, and Timap for Justice. She previously clerked for the Hon. David H. Coar in the Northern District of Illinois, served in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the US Department of State, and worked in the New York office of White & Case, LLP. Moy was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School, and holds a master’s degree in law and development from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Chelsea Payne was the country representative of the Carter Center in Liberia (2010–12) where she led the access to justice program. At the time of writing, Payne was a rule of law officer in the United Nations Rule of Law Unit in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General. Payne has a bachelor of civil laws (BCL) degree and a master of science degree in African studies from the University of Oxford, where she studied on a Rhodes Scholarship.

Taufik Rinaldi is an expert in the field of community development and legal aid in Indonesia. He initiated the Justice for the Poor program (the World Bank) and has conducted various studies in the field of access to justice to the poor, good governance, and anti-corruption. In addition to research and program management, Rinaldi is involved in drafting the National Strategy on Access to Justice in Indonesia (2010) and the Road Map Sustainability Community Empowerment in Indonesia (2014). Currently he is working as a freelance consultant who provides strategic policy advice to governments and donor agencies in Indonesia.

Hector Soliman acted as a team leader/project director for eight years in various multiyear access to justice and judicial reform projects, managing an intercultural staff to deliver results in court-annexed ADR, justice reform advocacy, and community legal services (legal advice, community meditation, litigation services, and referral to justice institutions). Soliman worked as a senior government official (Assistant Secretary and Undersecretary) managing the legal affairs of the Department of Agrarian Reform, including adjudication of agrarian disputes, community-level mediation programs for farmers, and internal matters such as contract review, procurement, promotions, and personnel discipline. He also acted as chief legal advisor to the Secretary of Agriculture. Soliman consulted for the ADB, the UNDP, the JBIC, the CIDA, the World Bank, the Global Fund, WHO, the Ford Foundation, and the Asia Foundation on various legal reform issues such as strengthening the administrative and financial systems of the judiciary, improving the criminal justice system and the national prosecution service, community paralegals, and others. He has been active in the legal service NGO sector for at least ten years, working closely in the fields of agrarian reform law and environmental law; facilitated the formation of a network of legal service organizations in the Philippines that eventually evolved into the Alternative Law Groups; and provided support to the network, as well as individual legal NGOs that work in the public interest. Soliman remains active in the practice of law intermittently in his career as partner or advisor of a law firm that works with, among others, alternative energy companies in the setting up of their operations in the Philippines.