Experts on countries of origin by surname

I am a UCL social science researcher in the field of Applied and Socio-linguistics, focusing on how experiences and claims of people seeking asylum in the UK and Europe as stateless people of Kuwait (i.e., Bidoon Kuwaitis) are communicated and disputed. My research is (in)formed by my training in refugee and forced migration studies at the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre and my lived experiences as a Bidoon Kuwaiti person going through the UK asylum system and eventually being recognised as a refugee following a successful appeal in which I was found to be a witness of truth.

Frederica Jansz is a Sri Lankan journalist and former editor of The Sunday Leader. Jansz began her career as a war reporter for Visnews, the television arm of Reuters, during the Sri Lankan Civil War. For over two decades, she conducted interviews with government soldiers and guerilla forces and served as an investigative journalist covering the Sri Lankan ethnic war and the Sri Lankan parliament. At the time, as one of the few female journalists in Sri Lanka, she established herself as a respected political and investigative reporter and became the anchor of a morning and late-night television show.

She joined The Sunday Leader, which has been described as a “politically fueled investigative newspaper” and as Sri Lanka’s “lone independent voice,” in 1994. She was subsequently asked by Lal Wickrematunge to become its editor in January 2009, following the assassination of editor-in-chief Lasantha Wickrematunge, under whom she had trained.

During her 24-year long career as a journalist, Jansz  worked extensively with journalists in Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Afghanistan including being a part of safety training workshops for journalists working in these conflict and battle zone areas, during her tenure as a journalist and as South… Read more

The Expert is an analyst and researcher based in Istanbul since 1989. His special areas of interest are leftist, Kurdish and Islamist movements and organizations, religious and ethnic minorities, rightist organizations, political Islam, human rights, security issues and civil-military relations.

Michelle Johnson is Associate Dean of Faculty for the Social Sciences and Professor of Anthropology at Bucknell University. A cultural anthropologist specializing in religion and ritual in Africa and the contemporary African diaspora (i.e., Africans in Europe and the United States), she has conducted extensive fieldwork in Guinea-Bissau and with Guinean immigrants in Portugal. She has held grants from the Social Science Research Council, the U.S. Department of Education (Fulbright-Hays), and the Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation). Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Religion in Africa, African Studies Review, Anthropology Quarterly, and Food and Foodways. She is author of Re-making Islam in African Portugal: Lisbon - Mecca - Bissau (Indiana University Press, 2020) and co-author (with Edmund "Ned" Searles) of Reciprocity Rules: Friendship and Compensation in Fieldwork Encounters (Lexington Books, 2021). She also provides expert testimony on asylum cases pertaining to West Africa and the contemporary African diaspora on topics such as genital cutting, forced marriage, and religious persecution and freedom. She teaches courses on cultural anthropology, the anthropology of religion, African Studies, and the life course and was… Read more

Will Jones is a British academic who has been working on Central and Southern Africa, with a specialization in asylum, since 2007. He received his doctorate on refugees in Central Africa, particularly Rwanda, from the University of Oxford, where he later became a Departmental Lecturer in the Politics of Asylum at Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre. He has also served as an Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Centre for Excellence in Global Mobility Law and is currently an Associate Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Luca Jourdan (PhD) is Full Professor of Social and Political Anthropology at the University of Bologna. Member of the Italian Ethnological Mission in Equatorial Africa, since 2001 he has carried out a field research on youth and war, childhood crisis, informal economies and the frontier in North Kivu (Democratic Republic of Congo). He is currently carrying on a research on Eritrean refugees in Kampala and on the conflict between central government and traditional kingdoms in Kasese district.