Email: lyoung@prorightsconsulting.com

Laura is a US-trained human rights lawyer based in Nairobi, Kenya who works across sub-Saharan Africa as a consultant on governance and human rights for USAID, the UN, governments, and international NGOs. Laura has published numerous articles and reports focused on conflict dynamics, gender, minority rights, transitional justice, migration, health, and other human rights issues in the African context. Laura has provided expert input for immigration and asylum cases in both the US and UK, focused on LGBT, FGM/C, domestic violence, trafficking, access to health services (including mental health and HIV), ex-combatants, ethnic minorities, disability access, police protection, and other key issues.

Email: louisa.lombard@yale.edu

Dr Louisa Lombard is an assistant professor of anthropology at Yale University. Previously she was a Ciriacy-Wantrup postdoctoral fellow in the department of geography at the University of California at Berkeley. She earned her PhD in cultural anthropology from Duke University in 2012. She is currently working on two book manuscripts, one of which takes a historical and ethnographic perspective to questions of how armed actors in eastern Central African Republic (C.A.R.) make claims to livelihoods and authority, and the other of which focuses on the “crisis” the country has faced since the end of 2012. She first conducted research in C.A.R. three months after former President Bozizé’s coup in 2003. Since then she has worked in C.A.R. as a field consultant to several international organizations, including Human Rights Watch, Small Arms Survey, Refugees International, and the World Bank, in addition to her academic research.

Email: p.burnham@ucl.ac.uk

Prof. Burnham is an anthropologist with extensive research experience in West and Central Africa, returning regularly to the region. He has undertaken extensive fieldwork for over forty years on various ethnographic themes including: economic and social change, kinship structures, inter ethnic relations, and the political structures of the Gbaya and Fulani peoples of Cameroon and the Central African Republic. His expertise includes the cultural impact of environmental development in Cameroon and Chad and has recently advised the UK government on socio-political issues in contemporary Central African Republic. He has also acted as expert witness on social, cultural and political affairs of Cameroon in numerous asylum and child protection cases since 1995. He has published extensively on all these issues.