Email: b.bowring@bbk.ac.uk

Prof Bowring has experience in Uzbekistan dating back to the 1990s when he first travelled to the country to undertake training of advocates in international human rights standards on behalf of the OSCE. In 2000, he devised and implemented intensive training of advocates, prosecutors and judges on the implications of Uzbekistan’s ratification of the UN ICCPR. Prof Bowring was invited by the British Embassy in January 2014 to participate in an international conference in Uzbekistan on reforms in the judicial system. Prof Bowring has close connections with various interlocutors to ensure he is constantly up to date with the situation on the ground. Please see this document for a full breakdown of Prof Bowring’s work in Uzbekistan.

Email: shukhrat9@gmail.com

Dr. Shukhrat Ganiev is the  coordinator of the Central Asian network for the protection of human rights defenders and Director of the Humanitarian Legal Center in Uzbekistan. He specialises in developing strategies of preventing social and ethnic conflicts and in analysing situations of migrant workers and illegal traffic of women and children. He can write about the  violations of the rights of ethnic minorities in Uzbekistan, the rights of vulnerable groups- women and children from Uzbekistan in Russian and Kazakhstan.

Email: shahrani@indiana.edu

M Nazif Shahrani is Professor of Anthropology, Central Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, has served two terms as Chairman of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and Director of the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Program at IU. Shahrani is an Afghan-American anthropologist with extensive field research in Afghanistan, and has studied Afghan refugee communities in Pakistan & Turkey. Since 1992 he has also conducted field research in post-Soviet Muslim republics of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. He is interested in the impact of Islam on social life, institutional dynamics and political culture of Muslims, problems of state-failure, role of nationalism in social fragmentation in multi-ethnic nation-states, and the political economy of international assistance to postcolonial failing states and its consequences. He grew-up bilingual in Uzbek & Tajik/Dari/Farsi, learned Pashtu, Kyrgyz, English and some Arabic.

Email: sipper@consolidated.net

Natalya Stepanova-Sipper is an adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law since January 2001, where she teaches, inter alia, Introduction to Russian and Uzbek Legal Systems (major topics: civil, commercial, constitutional, criminal and human rights laws). She is also the owner of the Stepanova-Sipper’s Central Asian Consulting since 1999.

For more than 25 years, Mrs. Stepanova-Sipper has advised on and given formal legal opinions with respect to aspects of Uzbek laws before Uzbek and American courts, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the United States Department of Justice, the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), the International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), the Curator’s Office of the Supreme Court of the United States, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, international organizations, companies and private persons. She also provided expert witness testimony for political asylum petitions. Mrs. Stepanova-Sipper is fluent in Russian and English, and can communicate in Ukrainian.

Email: speyrouse@email.gwu.edu

Mr. Sebastien Peyrouse is a Research Professor of International Affairs at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University and a Senior Research Fellow at East-West Institute in Washington D.C. Prior to joining the George Washington University and the East-West Institute, Prof. Peyrouse worked at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute& Silk Road Studies Program as well as at the Institute for Security and Development Policy in Stockholm. His main areas of expertise are political systems in Central Asia, Islam and religious minorities, and Central Asia’s geopolitical positioning toward China, Russia and South Asia. Professor Peyrouse is the author of Turkmenistan. Strategies of Power, Dilemmas of Development (M. E. Sharpe, 2011), and the co-author of The ‘Chinese Question’ in Central Asia. Domestic Order, Social Changes, and the Chinese Factor (Hurst, Columbia University Press, 2012) and of Globalizing Central Asia. Geopolitics and the Challenges of Economic Development (M.E. Sharpe, 2012). He has also co-edited China and India in Central Asia. A new “Great Game”? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and Mapping Central Asia: Indian Perceptions and Strategies (Ashgate, 2011).

Email: slavomir.horak@post.cz

Slavomír Horák is an Associate Professor of Political and Cultural Geography at the Department of Russian and East European Studies, Institute of International Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague. His research covers political, social and economic issues in Central Asia. He is the author of several books on Central Asian and Afghan internal development as well as numerous articles published in Czech, Russian and English scholarly journals. He particularly focuses on Turkmenistan’s domestic issues, especially informal politics and state- and nation-building. Slavomir Horak is willing to provide his services for a negotiable fee. He is a native Czech speaker and has highly advanced knowledge in Russian and advanced knowledge in English. He has intermediate knowledge in Persia/Tajik, Georgian and Spanish and can comprehend reading in Turkmen, Azeri, French or Ukrainian.