Contributors

Ayak Chol Deng Alak

Ayak Chol Deng Alak is a Peace Process Support Advisor for Inclusive Peace. Her work mainly focuses on identifying and supporting enabling environments for negotiations, mediation, and dialogues, and facilitating these processes. Before joining Inclusive Peace, Ayak was Head of Research at the South Sudan Strategic Defense and Security Review Board and Deputy Coordinator for the Civil Society Delegation to the South Sudan Peace Talks. She has a background in communication and was previously subcontracted by the Fondation Hirondelle to the United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) and the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS). Ayak also worked as a Political Analyst for the Ayin Network-Nuba Reports partnership sponsored by USAID to document the ongoing conflict in the Nuba Mountains, Blue Nile, and the Darfur Regions of Sudan. She is a co-founding member of the Senegal-based Pan African University for Citizen Engagement and was the Director of Neglected Tropical Diseases at the South Sudan National Ministry of Health. Ayak is a certified mediator, with a background in Medicine and Surgery. She speaks English, Arabic, and Kiswahili, and has a basic knowledge of French. She has worked on projects in Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, South Sudan, and Guinea.

 

Johanna Fisher

Professor Johanna Fisher is an adjunct professor in the Department of English and Co-Director of the Women & Gender Studies Program at Canisius University. Her focus of study and teaching involves analysing representations of gender and race in medieval literature. She also taught in the Modern Languages Department as professor of German and German literature with an emphasis on contemporary German fiction. Her current course, Representations of Nazis in Euro Fiction is a popular course that explores these representations. Johanna Fisher has co-authored two books of poetry, Join The Conversation and Time, Place, Home, Space-The Conversation Continues. She has also contributed to various online academic and literary journals and she currently contributes on a regular basis to the EU funded digital cultural institution, Europeana. Johanna sees writing as an important conversation between the writer and reader, as well as between the writer and the inner voice that speaks in ways that bring inspiration to create other imagined worlds-perhaps of those that stand anathema to war, hate and conflict. Moreover, the created spaces for writing can on the other hand, accommodate the language of conflict, trauma, and deprivation providing spaces of healing perhaps otherwise not possible. In this way she is always conscious of words and how words carry both meaning and connection to history and culture. Johanna is currently working on an historical fiction novel exploring her parents’ experiences of Nazi Germany and of racist America and the aftermath of trauma that left as she states a story of two wounded people who tried to carve a life together.

 

Jeffrey Harrod

Jeffrey Harrod is a writer, journalist and academic. He was born in London’s East End and was brought up in Barking, Essex. After leaving school at 15 and completing 2 years compulsory military service he graduated in law from University College, London, completed a master’s in international relations at Lehigh University, Pennsylvania as a Fulbright travel scholar and a Ph.D. in Political Science/International relations at University of Geneva, Switzerland. He has taught at graduate level International Law, International Organisation, International Political Economy, at universities in UK, USA, Jamaica, The Netherlands, and Erasmus University Rotterdam where he was Professor of Political Science. He had journalist experience in USA and in Geneva, Switzerland, then became a senior research director at the International Labour Organisation and was for many years permanent consultant for research and publications for a major international trade union, He currently lives in The Hague, Netherlands is married to chigiri-e artist Paddy Summerfield, who was formally a correspondent for Peace News, and has one son and a granddaughter. Surviving drone (then called pilotless aircraft or V1s) and rocket attacks on Barking in 1944-45 and attempted brutalisation in military service has had a lasting impact on his opposition to war and violence especially the support for it financed and engineered at the corporate level. He was at the March on the Pentagon against the Vietnam War in USA. Working on his book Power, Production and the Unprotected Worker brought him to research second wave feminism. This resulted in his first novel, After Man, an allegory for the end of patriarchy presented as a fifty-year history of the world after the last male was born.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Harrod

 

Mona Mansour

Mona Mansour is a certified CBT coach specialising in Trauma Recovery and Shadow Work since 2019. Passionate about helping clients integrate their shadow sides, she empowers individuals to accept and process their experiences, fostering emotional intelligence and self-awareness. Mona’s methods are deeply rooted in her personal journey and professional expertise, offering clients transformative insights and long-term growth. Previously, Mona ran a health studio for three years, blending Eastern and Western medical approaches to promote holistic well-being. Her compassionate, insightful techniques help clients achieve profound emotional healing and self-development, enabling them to lead more balanced, fulfilling lives.

 

Shivangi Misra

Shivangi Misra is an international human rights lawyer and currently serves as the Global Legal Advisor at Equality Now, where her work centres on combating sex-based discrimination and eliminating all forms of sexual violence, exploitation, and harmful practices. Prior to this role, she was with the Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action, where she led advocacy efforts addressing police violence against women, implementation of human rights standards, and advocated for justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous women and girls within a settler-colonial context. An attorney in India, she has worked with Senior Advocates at Lawyers’ Collective, and the UN. She now resides in Ottawa, where she actively organises with her community on peace through demilitarization, housing justice, and women’s liberation.

 

Gary G. Nelson

Gary G. Nelson has worked in systems engineering, including at federally funded Research and Development Centers in Washington, DC. He has worked and published in applying complex systems theory to projects, organizations and urban development.

 

Nij

Nij is a miniaturist who works chiefly in pen and ink. She has recently become curious about the possibilities of image-editing software. Her creative process usually begins with an abstract idea that sternly resists materialisation—often successfully, but sometimes not. So, her images represent ‘the failed efforts of some ideas to enjoy a purely cognitive existence’.

 

Jack Parvid

Jack Parvid is a philosopher, essayist, and short story writer currently living in the UK. His non-fiction work is mainly concerned with ethics.

 

Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, and Enlightenment Now. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” He was Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and writes frequently for the New York Times and other publications. His thirteenth book, to be published in 2025, is called When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life.

 

Winnet Shamuyarira

Winnet Shamuyarira is a Zimbabwean feminist activist whose work focuses on women’s bodily autonomy and interrogating power and patriarchy’s impact on women’s sexual and reproductive rights. She is passionate about creating safe spaces to support women to share their experiences and build collective power for change and action. Winnet holds an Honours Degree in English and Communications. Currently, she serves as the Guns, Power and Politics: Extractives, Militarisation and VAW Coordinator at WoMin African Alliance. WoMin is an ecofeminist Pan African organisation that supports African women and communities on the frontlines of violent, destructive extractivism in more than 17 countries across the continent. She has also worked at Just Associates (JASS), The Women’s Trust and Katswe Sistahood.

 

Kate Soper

Kate Soper is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and a former researcher with the Institute for the Study of European Transformations at London Metropolitan University. She has been an active supporter of the peace movement and during the 1980s was a Chair of European Nuclear Disarmament. She has published widely on theory of need and consumption, feminism, green politics and environmental philosophy. She has been an editor with Radical Philosophy and New Left Review and a columnist for the US journal, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. Her translations include works by Sebastiano Timpanaro, Noberto Bobbio, Michel Foucault, Cornelius Castoriadis and Carlo Ginsburg. Her own books include: On Human Needs (Harvester Press, 1981), Humanism and Anti-Humanism (Hutchinson, 1986), Troubled Pleasures: Writings on Politics, Gender and Hedonism (Verso,1990), What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human (Blackwell, 1995), and (with Martin Ryle) To Relish the Sublime? Culture and Self-Realisation in Postmodern Times (Verso, 2002). She has been involved in a number of research projects on sustainable consumption, most recently as a Visiting Fellow at the Pufendorf Institute, Lund University, Sweden. Her Post-Growth Living: for an Alternative Hedonism was published with Verso in 2020.

 

Margaret D. Stetz

Margaret D. Stetz is the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware, USA, as well as a widely published poet. She has published  more than 130 scholarly essays on topics ranging from feminist fiction, to gender and humour, to dress history, to women’s roles in warfare, and she is known internationally as a researcher on the subject of WWII-era Asian military sexual slavery. In addition, she has been curator or co-curator of over a dozen exhibitions on late-Victorian art and print culture, the most recent being Max Beerbohm: The Price of Celebrity (October 2023-January 2024) at the New York Public Library, and is the author of several exhibition catalogues, including Aubrey Beardsley, 150 Years Young (Grolier Club/U of Chicago Press, 2022).

 

Jerl Surratt

Jerl Surratt is a former advisor to and writer for nonprofit organizations in New York City providing early childhood education, medical care, social services, and legal assistance to underrepresented populations. A 2025 Pushcart Prize nominee for poetry, his poems have been published in The Amsterdam Quarterly, The Hopkins Review, The Irenaut, Kenyon Review, Literary Imagination, The New Criterion, other journals and two anthologies. He now lives in New York’s Hudson River Valley, where he’s completed one collection of poems and is nearing completion of a second. jerlsurratt.com

 

Nigel S. Thompson

Nigel S. Thompson is a poet, critic and translator. He has worked as a gardener and museum curator in Italy and an academic and creative writing tutor in Oxford. His latest collections are After War (New Walk Editions) and Ghost Hands (Melos Press), both 2020.

 

Tamar Tkemaladze

Tamar Tkemaladze is a Research and Peace Process Support Programme Analyst at the Swiss ‘think-and-do-tank’ Inclusive Peace. Her work experience and research primarily focus on peace and political transitions in Eastern Europe. Her prior experience included media monitoring during parliamentary elections in Georgia, research on corruption and the media environment, and support to local projects at Transparency International Georgia, Georgian Center for Strategy and Development and UNDP Georgia. Tamar holds a Joint Master’s in European Politics and Society, a combined program at Charles University, Leiden University and Jagiellonian University. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations with a concentration on East Asia from Free University of Tbilisi.

 

Jonathan Chibuike Ukah

Jonathan Chibuike Ukah is a Nigerian-born poet from the United Kingdom. His poems have been featured in Propel Magazine, The Pierian, Clockhouse, The Journal of Undiscovered Poets, North Dakota Quarterly, Kingsman Quarterly and elsewhere. I won the Voices of Lincoln Poetry Contest in 2022, the Alexander Pope Poetry Award of The Pierian in 2023, the Editors Choice Award in Unleash Press in 2024, the Second Prize Winner in Streetlight Poetry Prize in 2024, Second runner-up at the Kingsman Quarterly Poetry Slam in 2024 and I was shortlisted for the Minds Shine Bright Poetry Award in 2024.