Authors

Chaiwat Satha-Anand 

Dr. Satha‐Anand has been a pragmatic peacemaker in Thailand, engaging policymakers, military and civil society forces to stem violence and address conflict, particularly in the country’s south.  He was appointed to lead Thailand’s National Reconciliation Commission and has championed the mainstreaming of peace education in Thai schools. A globally renowned scholar of Islam and nonviolence, Dr. Satha‐Anand has pioneered the view that Islamic practices and values like fasting, daily prayers; self‐discipline and spiritual reflection are conducive to successful nonviolent conflict resolution.  Internationally, he is recognized for such influential works as, “The Nonviolent Crescent: Eight Theses on Muslim Nonviolent Action.” Dr. Satha‐Anand is founder and director of the Peace Information Centre at Thammasat University in Bangkok, Thailand, the Foundation for Democracy and Development Studies, and Thailand Research Fund. He is also the founder and Chair of the Strategic Nonviolence Committee (SNC), located first within the Royal Thai Government’s National Security Council and now a freestanding policy institute. Dr. Satha-Anand is recipient of  the 2012 El-Hibri Peace Education Prize Laureate. (Source)

Erica Chenoweth

Erica Chenoweth, Ph.D. is Professor and Associate Dean for Research at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, where she teaches courses on international relations, terrorism, nonviolent resistance, and contemporary warfare. Previously she has been an Associate Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute of Oslo (PRIO), an Assistant Professor at Wesleyan University, and has held visiting appointments at Harvard University¹s Kennedy School of Government, Stanford University, UC-Berkeley, and the University of Maryland. Her book with Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2011), won the 2012 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, given annually by the American Political Science Association in recognition of the best book on government, politics, or international affairs published in the U.S. in the previous calendar year. Chenoweth has presented her research all over the world at various academic conferences, government workshops, and international governmental organizations. She is currently an Academic Adviser at the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, a Research Fellow at the One Earth Future Foundation, and a Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations. (Source)

Jenni Williams 

Ms. Jennifer Williams is the founder and inspirational leader of "WOZA" (Women of Zimbabwe Arise), one of the most active civil society organizations in protesting government abuses in Zimbabwe. Ms. Williams has suffered arrest, harassment, and physical abuse. By uniting women in Zimbabwe of all races and ethnic backgrounds to advocate for issues directly affecting them, she has brought social, economic and political issues to national attention. Ms. Williams and WOZA lead annual peaceful marches on Valentine's Day and Mother's Day to promote peace and development. These marches have led to the mass arrest of peaceful women who are seen as threatening to the Government of Zimbabwe, but the women remain undeterred. Ms. Williams and the organization she founded have provided an example of courage and leadership by working for change through peaceful and nonviolent means. (Source, Source)

Jennifer Earl 

Jennifer Earl is a Professor of Sociology and (by courtesy) Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona. She is Director Emeritus of the Center for Information Technology and Society and Director Emeritus of the Technology and Society PhD Emphasis, both at University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on social movements, information technologies, and the sociology of law, with research emphases on Internet activism, social movement repression, and legal change. She is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for research from 2006-2011 on Web activism, co-author with Katrina Kimport of Digitally Enabled Social Change (MIT Press, 2011), which was awarded an Honorable Mention for the Communication and Information Technologies Section of the American Sociological Association’s Book Award in 2013, and is the winner of a career achievement award from the same ASA section for her research on internet activism. 

Lee A. Smithey 

Lee Smithey is a Professor in the Program in Peace and Conflict Studies at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. He studies social conflict and social movements, especially ethnopolitical conflict and nonviolent conflict methods. He has focused much of his work on conflict transformation in Northern Ireland. His book, Unionists, Loyalists, and Conflict Transformation in Northern Ireland (Oxford University Press), was launched at the Northern Ireland Assembly and won the 2012 Donald Murphy Book Prize for Distinguished First Book from the American Conference for Irish Studies. He is a Co-Primary Investigator of the Mural Mapping Project, a longitudinal and geo-spatial study of murals and public art in West Belfast and the Greater Shankill Road area. He has served as Chair of the Peace, War, and Social Conflict section of the American Sociological Association. 

Doron Shultziner

Doron Shultziner, Ph.D, was born in Haifa in 1975. He holds a BA in political science and Middle Eastern studies and MA (Summa Cum Laude) in political science, both from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His doctoral degree is from the University of Oxford. He was a fellow at the Institute for the Study of Modern Israel in Emory University, and then post-docs at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University. He is now Associate Professor in the Politics & Communications Department at Hadassah Academic College Jerusalem. His research interests cover various topics, focusing on social movements, media and comparative democratization. (Source, Source)