Lotje de Vries is associate professor at the Sociology of Development and Change Group of Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on borders, insecurity and relations between citizens and public authority in contexts of crisis. She currently is a senior fellow with MIASA, University of Ghana.

MIASA Project: Appropriating the frontier; securing development

Siphiwe Dube is a Senior Lecturer and former Head in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is an author of numerous interdisciplinary articles and chapters (and also supervises) on a range of topics covering African politics and religion, decoloniality, feminisms, post-colonial literature, race, religion and masculinities, religion and identity politics, religion and popular culture, and transitional justice.

Peter Narh is an Environmental Social Scientist at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana. His research addresses questions around the social bases of conservation of environmental resources. He thus applies these questions to understanding social approaches to any forms of environmental resources conservation and governance, with agriculture as a particular focus. Currently, his research fields are in Kenya and Ghana. He holds a PhD in Development Studies (Environmental governance option) from the University of Bayreuth in Germany.

Eleanor Tiplady Higgs (UK) is currently Lecturer in Sociology at Brunel University, London. She is an interdisciplinary feminist scholar in the humanities who completed her PhD in Gender Studies at SOAS, University of London in 2018. She was previously Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at University of Cape Town, and Fellow of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, in the 'Moralities' research section.

Mahamadou Bassirou Tangara is assistant professor of development economics at the University of Social Sciences and Management in Bamako (USSGB). His research focuses on poverty, informal economy and armed conflicts. He has done extensive fieldwork in Mali (Segou, Mopti, Gao and Bamako). His main contribution in development studies is the understanding of the role of hydro-agricultural developments in poverty reduction.

Julia Tischler is associate professor of African History and co-director of the Center for African Studies at the University of Basel, Switzerland, and currently a fellow at MIASA. Focusing on the history of southern Africa, she has published on questions of development, settler colonialism, environmental history, race, and agriculture.