Rebekka Friedman is Associate Professor in International Relations in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. Her research and teaching focus on the intersections of conflict and peace studies, formal and informal healing, post-conflict justice, peacebuilding and care, and understanding legacies of violence and harm. She has carried out field research in communities affected by armed conflict in Sierra Leone, Peru, and Sri Lanka. She is interested in visual and arts-based methodologies and in the use of documentary film as a participatory research tool and a form of commemoration. Rebekka has carried out extensive research on state-enforced disappearances and their legacies on surviving family members and communities. Her work has been published in academic presses and International Relations and feminist journals. She is currently co-editing a journal special issue on forced separation for the International Journal of Human Rights.

Diana Flórez-Muñoz is a lawyer and interdisciplinary researcher with a PhD in International Relations from the University of St Andrews and an MSc in Development from the LSE. She has over 13 years of experience in Latin America, specialising in gender, violence, and forced separation in contexts of armed conflict, migration, and organised crime. Her work includes international legal analysis and engagement with Latin American states on protection frameworks and human rights. She has advised UN Women, human rights organisations, and women’s groups on protection policies and access to rights. She is currently a Gender Advisor to UN Women Honduras, Senior Consultant with the Women’s Refugee Commission, and Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London. Her current research focuses on the gendered impacts of migration and forced separation in Central America, particularly on deported women, and on the differentiated and marginalised impacts of enforced disappearance on fathers.

Nyi Nyi Kyaw is a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. He is also an Honorary Fellow of the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at Melbourne Law School. Prior to joining the University of Bristol, he was one of the twelve Research Chairs on Forced Displacement in the Global South, funded by the International Development Research Centre (Canada) and based at Chiang Mai University in Thailand. He holds a Ph.D. in International and Political Studies from the University of New South Wales in Canberra. His research interests include identity, citizenship, nationalism, (forced) migration and contentious politics, with a particular focus on Myanmar and Southeast Asia. His work has been published in journals including Political Geography, Social Identities, Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, Asian Journal of Law and Society, and Statelessness & Citizenship Review, among others.

Phoebe Martin is a feminist researcher who uses arts-based research methods to understand multiple forms of gender-based violence in Latin America. Her PhD, completed in 2022 at University College London, looked at how feminist activists in Peru use creative interventions around gender violence and reproductive justice. These actions, including art, performance, and audiovisual media create new spaces for social and cultural change in difficult political contexts. Since completing her PhD, she has worked at the University of York and King’s College London, where she researched the memorialisation of sexual violence, and the use of creative methods to research sexual harassment and resistance to gender-based violence. Her work appears in Signs and the Bulletin of Latin American Research. She is co-editor of Decolonising Andean Identities: Andinxs, Activism and Social change (UCL Press) and her monograph Visual and Embodied Politics: Feminist Activism and Art in Peru is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic.

Yajna Sanguhan is completing her PhD in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests lie at the intersection of gender, conflict and politics with a specialisation in Sri Lanka. Yajna’s current research demonstrates how the Sri Lankan civil war shapes Tamil women’s informal political engagement, supporting both the household and the community. Prior to the PhD, Yajna has conducted research on the political economy of development in conflict-affected areas, studying household access to livelihoods and services, and perceptions of governance. Additionally, she has studied the political economy of violence against women, women’s labour force participation and structural inequality. Throughout her work she has focused on the particular vulnerabilities of women-headed households in post-war contexts. Yajna has over a decade of fieldwork and research experience, employing a wide variety of both quantitative methods, utilising household surveys and global cross-country datasets, and qualitative methods including in-depth interviews and ethnography.

Zala Pochat Križaj is a doctoral candidate at King’s College London in the Department of War Studies. Her research interests focus on war crimes and crimes against humanity, the legacies of war, reconciliation after violence and conflict, post-war justice, and the memory of war. Her PhD thesis looks at post-Second World War mass killings in Slovenia and their impact on reconciliation, historical revisionism and unresolved memories. She has experience in working with polarised political topics, conducting interviews and archival research. Her background is in political science, criminology and international peace and security. She has worked on several projects, including the role of peace museums in reconciliation or digital rights NGOs in the Global South, particularly how international funders influence the understanding of ‘digital rights’. She previously worked as a policy research intern in modern slavery and volunteered for a human rights NGO working with victims of trafficking and abuse.

Professor Fionnuala Ní Aoláin is concurrently Regents Professor and Robina Professor of Law, Public Policy and Society at the University of Minnesota Law School and Professor of Law at the Queens University, Belfast, Northern Ireland.  Professor Ní Aoláin is the recipient of numerous academic awards and honors including the Leverhulme Fellowship, British Academy Awards, the Alon Prize, the Robert Schumann Scholarship, a European Commission award, Fulbright scholarship and the Lawlor fellowship. She is an elected fellow of the Royal Irish Academy and Fellow of the British Academy. She has held visiting positions at Harvard Law School, Yale University, Princeton University, the Geneva Academy, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has published extensively in the fields of emergency powers, counter-terrorism and human rights, conflict regulation, transitional justice and sex-based violence in times of war. Professor Ní Aoláin was United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights while Countering Terrorism (2017- 2023).  She was appointed K.C (Hons) in 2004.  She was elected counsellor to the American Society of International Law in 2025.  She is currently a member of the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic.