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.

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 recently completed 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.

Nyi Nyi Kyaw has joined the Department of War Studies, King's College London, as a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Relational Harm Project. Originally from Myanmar, his research explores identity, citizenship, nationalism, (forced) migration, borders, contentious politics, atrocities, war and society, and human rights. While maintaining a continued focus on Myanmar and the Rohingya crisis in particular, he has expanded his work to broader regional dimensions in Southeast and South Asia with regards to his thematic interests. He is also an Honorary Fellow at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, Melbourne Law School. Prior to King's, he was a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, and before that, one of twelve Research Chairs on Forced Displacement in the Global South, a position funded by the International Development Research Centre (Canada) and based at Chiang Mai University, Thailand. He holds a PhD in International and Political Studies from the University of New South Wales, Canberra. His work has appeared in Political Geography, Social Identities, Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, Asian Journal of Law and Society, and Statelessness & Citizenship Review, among others.

Zala Pochat Križaj recently completed her PhD 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 looked 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.

Darcy Gresham is a PhD student in the Department of War Studies, concentrating on familial separation in the Second World War. With a background in history and international security, she has previously studied the exertion of imperial power over indigenous autonomy, including over children’s lives in the contexts of Greenland and Australia, examining forced separations as abusive and pernicious methods of colonial control enacted by tearing apart families and the familiar. Her current work builds on these themes, combining research across global archives with present day inquiries and testimony, probing the enablement and impacts of familial separation. She is also interested in restorative justice, questioning the repercussions of child migration schemes across future generations.