Email: danigrigsby@gmail.com

Ms. Danielle Grigsby is a Researcher and Affiliate of Forced Migration / Refugee Studies at the Feinstein International Center of Tufts University. Formerly, she has worked as a Refugee Resettlement Case Manager for the International Rescue Committee, in state policy research for the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition (MIRA), and as a refugee resource specialist for Moscow-based NGO, Opora.  Grigsby is conversant in Russian and currently conducts research on Moscow-based Chechen IDPs, human smuggling patterns to, and through, Russia, pathways of resettlement in the former Soviet Union, Russia’s fascist gang-movement and Moscow’s Diaspora remittances and networks.  Grigsby specializes in non-CIS forced migration to Moscow and its nongovernmental refugee service delivery.

Email: egilliga@indiana.edu

Emma Gilligan is the Director of the Human Rights Institute and Associate Professor of Russian History at the University of Connecticut. She has worked on asylum cases for Russian citizens seeking asylum in the United States and as a consultant for the public defenders office. She wrote Defending Human Rights in Russia; Sergei Kovalyov Dissident and Human Rights Commissioner, 1969-96 (Routledge, 2004). Her second book, Terror in Chechnya: Russia and the Tragedy of Civilians in War (Princeton University Press, 2010) examines the war crimes committed by Russian soldiers against the civilian population of Chechnya.

Email: Federica.Prina@glasgow.ac.uk

Federica Prina is a Research Associate at the School of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Glasgow. She is part of a team implementing the three years (2014-2017) research project ‘National Minority Rights and Democratic Political Community: Practices of Non-Territorial Autonomy in Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe’, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. Her field of research encompasses cultural, linguistic and participatory rights of national minorities in the post-Soviet space, particularly the Russian Federation, Moldova, Estonia and Ukraine. From 2011 to 2013 she was a researcher at the European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI), in Flensburg (Germany), where she coordinated the research cluster ‘Culture and Diversity’. From 2012 to 2014 she was the editor of the Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe (JEMIE) . Federica Prina has also worked for human rights organisations, including Article 19 (the Global Campaign for Free Expression), Amnesty International and Minority Rights Group.

The Expert is a Country Expert and academic with extensive fieldwork experience and providing expert reports (100+) for more than 40 firms in the UK, US, Netherlands, and Canada with areas of expertise such as but not limited to:

• Authentication documents originating from countries of expertise
• Country reports on the indicated countries of expertise
• Minority groups, religious groups
• Political, social and cultural groups: LGBT
• Organised crime and mafia, state crime
• Extremist and violent groups, including religious groups
• Human rights violations
• Women issues: honour killing
• Human trafficking
• Psychiatry and prison conditions
• Disadvantaged groups e.g. children, minorities, mentally ill, disabled, terminally ill
• Availability of medical services
• State structure, military and security services
• Drug dealing and trafficking

Email: maria.popova@mcgill.ca

Maria Popova, PhD in Government (Harvard University), is Associate Professor of Political Science and Jean Monnet Chair at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. She is also a the Scientific Co-Director of the Jean Monnet Centre Montreal and a faculty associate at the Institute for the Study of International Development (ISID) at McGill. She is the author of Politicized Justice in Emerging Democracies: A Study of Courts in Russia and Ukraine (Cambridge University Press, 2012), the winner of the 2012-2013 American Association for Ukrainian Studies prize for best book in the fields of Ukrainian history, politics, language, literature, and culture.  Her research focuses on judicial independence, the rule of law, and corruption in the post-Communist region.  She is currently working on a book manuscript on the politics of corruption prosecutions.  She also follows and writes about post-Maidan judicial reform in Ukraine.

Marilisa Lorusso, PhD on Democracy and Human Rights, MA in Russian Language and Literature, BA in Diplomacy. She has taught several courses in history, Eastern Europe, international relations, domestic and foreign politics, business, literature and culture in many universities (İstanbul Üniversitesi, Turkey; El Manar, Tunisia; American University, Armenia; Università Degli Studi di Genova, Italy). She is a permanent co-operator of Osservatorio Balcani Caucaso Transeuropa, an Italian think tank, and writes for different centres of studies. She was deployed by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the post-war European Union Monitoring Mission in Georgia (EUMM), where she was field office gender focal point; she was appointed as EU Council Secretariat for the post-war diplomatic discussions held in Geneva. She is a Country of Origin Expert aslo for the US Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, for the UK Electronic Immigration Network and she provided report on a wide area of expertise (climate-related issues, disability, public health and services, forced marriage, LGBTQ+ issues, domestic violence, military/police service, prison conditions, civil and political rights, gang-related violence, minority issues, refugees and IDPs, war and post-conflict response).

Her list of open-source publications is available at http://marilisalorusso.blogspot.com and https://independent.academia.edu/MLorusso.

Email: r.mole@ucl.ac.uk

Prof. Richard Mole is Professor of Political Sociology at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL. He has an MPhil from Cambridge University and a PhD from the London School of Economics, both in International Relations. He spent extended periods of time studying and working in the USSR and subsequently in Russia and the Baltic States and speaks fluent Russian. His research focuses on homosexuality and homophobia in Russia and the former USSR (especially political homophobia) and migration by LGBT individuals from Russia, the former USSR and Poland to the Germany and the UK. He has provided expert reports on asylum cases made on the basis of ethnicity and sexual orientation.

Email: tgerman.jscsc@da.mod.uk

Dr. Tracey German is a Reader in the Defence Studies Department at King’s College, London. Her research focuses on Russia’s relations with its neighbours, and conflict and security in the Caucasus and Caspian region, and she has published widely on these issues. Prior to this she lectured at RMA Sandhurst and the University of Aberdeen, and worked as a research manager for a business intelligence company, specialising in energy security. She is a graduate in Russian from the University of Edinburgh and was awarded a PhD on the topic of Russia’s conflict with Chechnya. She has expertise on the ongoing conflict in Chechnya, security in the Caucasus and Central Asia, and energy issues in the former Soviet states. She is a Russian speaker, has lived in Russia and Ukraine, and travelled extensively across the post-Soviet space.

Email: vsd2@st-andrews.ac.uk

Dr Victoria Donovan is a lecturer at the University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on Russian history and culture, with an emphasis on local identities, heritage politics, and the cultural memory of the Soviet past in twenty-first century Russia. She has spent extended periods of time living and working in Russia and serves as the Director of the Centre for Russian, Soviet, Central and East Europe Studies at the University of St Andrews. She has recently been selected as an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker for 2016/2017, where she will be developing programmes based on her research with the BBC.