Shinya Konaka is Professor, School of International Relations, and Dean, Graduate School of International Relations, University of Shizuoka. He has been conducting field research among Maa-speaking pastoralists, mainly the Samburu, since 1992. He was awarded the 13th Okita Prize in International Development, the 8th Japan Consortium for Area Studies Award for Prominent Scholar, and the JASID Special Award, 2018. He is the author of Localization of Humanitarian Assistance Frameworks for East African Pastoralists, African Study Monographs. Supplementary Issue, 53 (coedited with Sun Xiaogang, 2017) and ‘Livestock as interface: The case of the Samburu in Kenya’ in Anthropology of Things (TransPacific Press 2018).

Peter D. Little is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Global Development Studies Program, Emory University. He has conducted studies of political ecology, pastoralism, poverty and inequality, informality, development, and statelessness in Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia. Currently, he is engaged in a comparative study of ‘Changing Perceptions of Poverty and Well-being in Baringo County, Kenya and South Wollo, Ethiopia’. Dr. Little is the author of Economic and Political Reform in Africa: Anthropological Perspectives (Indiana University Press, 2013), The Elusive Granary: Herder, Farmer, and State in Northern Kenya (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and Somalia: Economy without State (Indiana University Press/ James Currey, 2003); and co-author of Risk and Social Change in an African Rural Economy: Livelihoods in Pastoralist
Communities (Routledge, 2016).

Greta Semplici is a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. She has earned a D.Phil. (Ph.D.) from the Oxford Department of International Development. She conducted an ethnographic study on the understanding of resilience from the perspective of mobile pastoralists in Turkana County, in the arid lands of NorthernKenya. Her current research interests lie at the interface between nomadism, mobility and migration, drawing lessons from the experiences of ‘mobile peoples’. She is also interested in human-animal-environment relationships, and broader issues concerning development and international cooperation. Previously, Greta worked for FAO Somalia as Monitoring and Evaluation International Consultant and collaborated with LAMA Development and Cooperation Agency for research on social protection strategies in rural Malawi. She also held several RA positions with ODI (Overseas Development Institute), IMI (International Migration Institute) and EUI (European University Institute). She holds a B.A. in Development Economics and International Studies (laurea triennale) and M.Sc. in Development Economics (laurea specialistica) from the University of Florence. Greta spent the academic year 2021/22 working on her book project, provisionally titled, Moving Deserts: Resilience and Development in the Drylands.

Go Shimada is a Professor at the School of Information and Communication, Meiji University and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of International Development Studies. He holds a Ph.D. from Waseda University (2014) and MA from Manchester (1999). He is a founding board member of the Japanese Association for Development Economics (JADE). Previously, he was an Associate Professor at the University of Shizuoka, Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, First Secretary of the Permanent Mission of Japan to the United Nations, and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). He is the author of ‘Does environmental policy make African industry less competitive? The possibilities in green industrial policy’ in The Quality of Growth in Africa, edited by Ravi Kanbur, Akbar Noman, and Joseph E. Stiglitz (2019), 350 372. New York: Columbia University Press. He is also the co-editor of Workers, Managers, Productivity: Kaizen in Developing Countries (Singapore, Palgrave Macmillan, co-edited with Akio Hosono and John Page).

Tamara Enomoto is Professor at the Organization for the Strategic Coordination of Research and Intellectual Properties, Meiji University. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo (2015), an M.A. in Conflict, Development and Security (2004)and an M.A. in Development Studies (2002) from the University of Leeds. From 2003 to 2015, she worked at Oxfam where she was in charge of policy, advocacy and research on humanitarian and arms control issues and coordinated humanitarian aid and advocacy projects. Her recent publications include ‘Demarcating battle lines: Citizenship and agency in the era of misanthropy’ in Ituhiro Hazama, Kiyoshi Umeya, and Francis B. Nyamnjoh (eds). Citizenship in Motion: South African and Japanese Scholars in Conversation (2019, Langaa RPCIG), ‘Overcoming the dichotomy between Africa and the West: Norms and measures for arms transfers to non-state actors’ in Mitsugi Endo, Michael Neocosmos and Ato Kwamena Onoma (eds). African Politics of Survival Extraversion and Informality in the Contemporary World (2020, Langaa RPCIG), Weapon Taboos: Genealogies of Pariah Weapons (2020, Nihon Keizai Hyouronsha, edited book in Japanese), and The Arms Trade Treaty: The Self, Sovereignty, and Arms Transfer Control (2020, Kouyou Shobou, book in Japanese).

Toru Sagawa is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Letters, Keio University, Japan. He has conducted field research in East Africa. His recent works include ‘Large-scale development projects, food security policy and livelihood of agropastoralists in southwestern Ethiopia’, in M. Takahashi et al. (eds.) Development and Subsistence in Globalising Africa: Beyond the Dichotomy (2021, Langaa RPCIG), and ‘Waiting on a friend: Hospitality and gift to the ‘enemy’ in the Daasanach’, Nilo- Ethiopian Studies 23 (2019).

Rahma Hassan is a social-economic researcher from Kenya and a PhD fellow from the University of Nairobi and the University of Copenhagen, under the Rights and Resilience Project. She has worked in social development research, in government and research on health, gender, and governance. Currently, she is researching community land rights among pastoralist communities in Kenya.

Itsuhiro Hazama is a Professor of Anthropology at Toyo University in the Faculty of Sociology. His research focuses on ethnography of human-animal interaction and citizenship studies. He has recently co-authored ‘Naturalography of co-existence among East African pastoral societies: An introductory overview of Japanese scholarship’ (African Study Monographs 40 (2 3): 45 75, 2019); and co-edited Citizenship in Motion: South African and Japanese Scholars in Conversation (Bamenda: Langaa Rpcig, 2019).

Giulia Gonzales is a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute (Florence) and is affiliated with PASTRES, Pastoralism, Uncertainty, Resilience. Her current project, ‘Emerging (Dis)Connections. Crisis, (im)mobilities and citizenship: Navigating uncertainties among Kel Tamasheq in Bamako’ emphasises the making and unmaking of connections by Kel Tamasheq within and beyond Bamako as ways to embrace current socio-economic and political uncertainties, and as processes of state-formation within a globalised world. She has conducted fieldwork in Bamako (Mali), Ouagadougou and the refugee camp of Sag-Nioniogo (Burkina Faso), exploring issues of ethnicity and nationalism, belonging, placemaking, migration and displacement, and everyday politics. She has also worked on migration in Europe, focusing on receptions of health services by thirdcountry communities (CeSPI), and connectivity and mobility (ERC TRAFIG). She has published on Nomadic Peoples, L’Ouest Saharien, and contributed to co-edited volumes.

Takuto Sakamoto is a Professor at the Graduate Program on Human Security, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo. Dr. Sakamoto has been conducting research on a broad array of subjects, including human security, global governance, state and conflict, and dryland pastoralism, all with a particular focus on Africa. He also has extensive methodological interests in data analysis and simulation. His major works include Integration and Disintegration of Territorial Rule: Multi-Agent Simulation Analysis of the States in Northeast Africa (Tokyo: Shoseki-kobo Hayama, 2011) (in Japanese) and ‘Computationalresearch on mobile pastoralism using agent-based modeling and satellite imagery’ (PLOS ONE, Vol. 11, No. 3, 2016).

Rumiko Murao is a researcher at the Research Institute of Humanity and Nature, Kyoto, Japan. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Kyoto (2009) in Area Studies. Her recent publications include ‘The endogenous reintegration of postconflict Angola society,’ African Study Monographs (in Press, 2022), ‘Zambia’ In K. Makino and E. Iwasaki (eds). Global Social Welfare: Africa and Middle East. Tokyo. Jyunpousha. pp. 225 247. (2020, in Japanese), ‘The daily life strategies of small-scale farmers after a prolonged war: The long-term influence of humanitarian assistance.’ African Study Monographs Supplementary Issue, 53: 103 116. (2017), ‘Land use of Angolan immigrants in western Zambia: Rethinking the autonomy and coexisting of self-settled refugee communities in host countries.’ In A. Takada and I. K. Nyamongo. (eds). Mila Special Issue. pp. 59 67. (2014), Creativity of African Farmers. Kyoto: Showado (2012. a monograph in Japanese)

Ian Scoones is a Professor at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. He leads the ERC Advanced Grant funded PASTRES programme (Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Resilience: Global Lessons from the Margins, www.pastres.org). He has worked on land, agriculture and livelihoods, including pastoralism, for over 35 years, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa (see ianscoones.net)