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Mouin Rabbani is a researcher and analyst specialising in the contemporary Middle East and Co-Editor of Jadaliyya. He has previously served as Principal Political Affairs Officer with the Office of the UN Special Envoy for Syria, Head of Middle East with Crisis Management Initiative/Martti Ahtisaari Centre, Senior Middle East Analyst and Special Advisor on Israel-Palestine with the International Crisis Group, and Project Director with the Association of Netherlands Municipalities. He is Senior Fellow with the Institute for Palestine Studies, Contributing Editor of Middle East Report, Associate Fellow of the European Council on Foreign Relations, and Policy Advisor to Al-Shabaka - The Palestinian Policy Network. A graduate of Tufts University and Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Rabbani has published, presented and commented widely on Middle East issues, including for most major global media.

Noura Erakat is an Assistant Professor at George Mason University where she teaches in the legal studies, international studies, and human rights/social justice studies concentrations. Her scholarly interests include humanitarian law, human rights law, refugee law, and national security law. She earned her BA and JD from Berkeley Law School and her LLM in National Security from the Georgetown University Law Center. She is a Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya e-zine. Prior to beginning her appointment at GMU, Noura was a Freedman Teaching Fellow at Temple Law School and has has taught International Human Rights Law and the Middle East at Georgetown University since 2009. 

Upon completing law school, Noura received a New Voices Fellowship to develop a litigation unit aimed at redressing Palestinian human rights claims under the ATS in US federal courts. She went on to serve as Legal Counsel for a Congressional Subcommittee in the House of Representatives, chaired by Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich. In Spring 2010, Noura worked with a Lebanese human rights attorney to file habeus corpus petitions on behalf of Iraqi refugees detained by Lebanese authorities.Upon leaving Lebanon, she became the Legal Advocate for the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights where she represented their claims before the Human Rights Council, human rights treaty bodies, among the UN diplomatic missions as well as among the US Administration and Congress. 

Her scholarly publications include: "U.S. vs. ICRC-Customary International Humanitarian Law and Universal Jurisdiction" in the Denver Journal of International Law & Policy, “New Imminence in the Time of Obama: The Impact of Targeted Killings on the Law of Self-Defense” in the Arizona Law Review, and "Overlapping Refugee Legal Regimes: Closing the Protection Gap During Secondary Forced Displacement," forthcoming in the Oxford Journal of International Refugee Law . Noura’s media appearances include MSNBC, Fox News, PBS NewsHour, BBC World Service, NPR, Democracy Now, and Al Jazeera. She has published in The Nation, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Huffington Post, IntlLawGrrls, The Hill, and Foreign Policy, among others. Noura is the co-editor with Mouin Rabbani of Aborted State? The UN Initiative and New Palestinian Junctures, an anthology related to the 2011 and 2012 Palestine bids for statehood at the UN. Twitter: @4noura

Yara Hawari is the Senior Analyst of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. She completed her PhD in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter, where she taught various undergraduate courses and continues to be an honorary research fellow. In addition to her academic work, which focused on indigenous studies and oral history, she is a frequent political commentator writing for various media outlets including The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and Al Jazeera English.

Lina Meruane is a Chilean writer and scholar who teaches Latin American Cultures, Arts and Cultures in the Core Program and has taught a senior seminar entitled Pathological Citizenship at the Global Liberal Studies Program. She is also affiliated to the M.F.A. in Creative Writing in Spanish.

Since 1998, she has authored a short-story collection, a play and five novels. Sangre en el ojo, was awarded the prestigious Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize (Mexico) in 2012 and has been translated into English, Italian, German, Dutch, French and Portuguese. Meruane has also received the Anna Seghers Prize (Berlin, 2011) and Calamo Prize (Spain, 2016), as well as literary fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (US 2004), the National Endowment for the Arts (US 2010) and the DAAD Artists in Berlin Program (Germany 2017). Her essay-books include her scholarly work on the impact of AIDS in Latin American literature, Viral Voyages (Palgrave McMillan, 2014), a chronicle on her Palestinian origins, Volverse Palestina (Becoming Palestine, 2014) and a short essay book, Contra los hijos (Against Children, 2014).