János Bársony
is a researcher focusing on Roma rights, Roma history, and folk music. He was the Secretary of the Budapest Roma Coordination Committee in 1977–1990 and participated in the development of the Roma Folklore movement. János is the founder of Phralipe and Amalipe Roma organizations, and worked for the Roma Civil Rights Foundation (1996–2004). He has authored numerous articles and co-edited the following volumes with Ágnes Daróczi: The fate of Roma during the Holocaust (New York: Idebate press, 2008), Vrana mámi mesél (Budapest: SuliNova, 2005) [Mother Vrana’s fairytales]. He was the screenwriter and editor of an educational film series about Roma history entitled Historia romani and, the editor of the 35-minute documentary film Untouchables.
Anna-Mária Bíró
PhD, is the Director of the Tom Lantos Institute, an international human and minority rights organization focusing on research and education based in Budapest, Hungary. From 2007–2011, Anna-Mária was a senior consultant to the Managing Multiethnic Communities Programme of LGI/Open Society Foundations, and was the director of the course “Incorporating Ethnocultural Diversity into the Teaching of Public Administration” organized by Central European University. Prior to this, she directed the Europe office of Minority Rights Group International for eight years. She has also worked as the Advisor on Minority Affairs at the OSCE Mission in Kosovo and as an Advisor on International Relations to the President of the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania. Anna-Mária holds an MSc in Public Administration and Public Policy from the London School of Economics and a PhD in political sciences from the Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Law and Political Science, Budapest, Hungary. Among others, Anna-Mária is co-editor of Diversity in Action: Local Public Management of Multi-ethnic Communities in Central and Eastern Europe (Budapest: LGI/OSI, 2001) and co-author of Minority Rights Advocacy in the European Union: A Guide for NGOs in South-East Europe (London: MRG, 2006). In 2011 she co-edited with Corinne Lennox volume 18(2) of the International Journal on Minority and Group Rights (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2011) on civil society contributions to the international regime of minority protection. Since 2018, she is Editor-in-Chief of the series International Studies in Human Rights and Identity published by Brill/Nijhoff Academic Publishers.
PhD, is Professor of Law at the School of Law at Middlesex University London, and Adjunct Professor of Law at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, Galway, Ireland. He is the Executive Director of Minority Rights Group International and founder of the Annual Summer School on Minorities, first held in June 2001 in Galway, Ireland. Joshua has held visiting positions in Ireland, Spain, Hungary and Italy. He worked as a journalist in Mumbai, India, with the Indian Express Group, was awarded a Chevening Scholarship to pursue an MA in International Law and Politics in 1995 and completed his PhD in International Law in 1998. Joshua has authored seven books on international law and human rights law, on self-determination, title to territory and indigenous peoples rights, in addition to over fifty academic articles on a range of these and other legal sub-topics. Joshua was part of the EU-China Experts and Diplomatic Dialogue and Lawyers for the New Millennium: Support for the Arab Law Union. He regularly engages with multilateral organizations, law societies, the judiciary and NGOs in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, on issues related to human rights advocacy and public international law. He sits on the Leadership Council of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (UNSDSN) convened by Jeffrey Sachs under the auspices of the UN Secretary General, where he co-chairs the working group entitled Gender, Social Exclusion and Vulnerable Groups.
Kathleen Cavanaugh
PhD, is socio-legal scholar and currently a Lecturer in the Faculty of Law, Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland, Galway. She holds a PhD in Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science and an LLm from the Queen’s University of Belfast, Northern Ireland. She has held several Visiting Lectureships including: Visiting Research Fellow, Minerva Centre for Human Rights, Hebrew University, Israel, and Visiting Lecturer, Department of International Relations, Boston University, Massachusetts, USA, and was awarded a Fellowship at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford. Her areas of expertise include: nationalism, ethnic conflict, political violence, states of emergency, narratives on Islamic law and rights, freedom of religion and militant democracy. She held the position of Chair of the Executive Committee of Amnesty International Ireland (2004–2010), and was a member of the International Policy Committee of Amnesty International and a Board member of Amnesty International USA (2012–2015). As a consultant, she has undertaken numerous missions on behalf of Amnesty International including to Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine and to Iraq (where she focused on the conduct of the occupying powers in relation to detention and security). She has conducted trainings for governmental as
György Csepeli
PhD, DSc, is Professor of Social Psychology and head of the Interdisciplinary Social Research Doctoral Program at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, chair of the Interdisciplinary Social Research Doctoral Program at the Faculty of Social Sciences, ELTE, and Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is the president of the Hungarian Sociological Association. His areas of expertise include social psychology of intergroup relations including national identity, antisemitism, xenophobia and anti-Roma sentiments. His research interests have recently turned toward the relationship between the internet and society. He has taught at various American universities (Oregon State, UCLA, Michigan State, New School for Social Research, Montclair State).
Ágnes Daróczi
is a Roma activist, minority researcher, and journalist. She has been actively involved in promoting Roma rights in Hungary, and has focused on empowerment and memoralization at the European level. She promoted these issues through the Human Rights Days, Roma Holocaust Remembrance Days and other public events. She organized the very first Roma Fine Arts Exhibition, founded the first Roma TV-Magazine, and was an initiator of the Roma Folklore movement. She produced several films, authored and published numerous articles, and co-edited several books with Bársony János, including The fate of Roma during Holocaust (New York: idebate press, 2008), Vrana mámi mesél (Budapest: SuliNova, 2005) [Mother Vrana’s fairytales]. She co-produced an educational film series entitled Historia romani about the history of Roma for the Romedia Foundation.
Ferenc Eiler
PhD, is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Minority Studies, Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences and is the Editor of the journal Századok. He obtained his PhD in 1998 at the Modern Universal History Department, Janus Pannonius University of Sciences, Pécs and his Master’s degree in History and German at the József Attila University of Sciences Szeged in 1994. His research interests include the minority policies of the German and Hungarian governments, and the history of the German and Hungarian minorities. Ferenc authored the book Németek, helyi társadalom és hatalom. Harta, 1920–1989 [Germans, Local Society and Power: Harta, 1920–1989]
Tamás Kiss
PhD, is a researcher at the Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities in Cluj, Romania. He obtained an MA in sociology at Babeș-Bolyai University and a PhD in cultural studies at the University of Pécs (Dissertation title: The Administrative Gaze. Towards a Comparative Analysis of the Hungarian Demographic Discourses in Romania. On the Statistical Construction of the Transylvanian Hungarian Population). His main research interests are ethnic politics, demography and ethnicity (processes of census ethnic categorization, differences of demographic and migratory behaviour), and demographic discourses (both in global and national perspective). His English language papers have been published in various journals, including Eastern European Politics and Society, Problems of Post-Communism and Nationality Papers. Tamás was the editor of the volume, Unequal Accommodation of Minority Rights. Hungarians in Transylvania (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
Angéla Kóczé
PhD, is a sociologist. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wake Forest University. She is also a research fellow at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Sociology, and an affiliated research fellow at Central European University, Centre for Policy Studies. Angéla has done research focused mainly on social and legal inequalities of Roma in various European countries, as well as on the intersection of gender, ethnicity, and class with respect to minority and migrant populations in Europe. She has written extensively about the racialization and the unequal access to social, economic and political rights of Roma in Europe. Some of her work was published in various books by Palgrave and Ashgate, as well as by international organisations such as the UNDP. In addition to her academic career, Angéla also worked as a senior policy adviser in the Hungarian government (2004–2008). Previously, while working on her PhD, she worked as a funding director at the European Roma Information Office (ERIO) in Brussels (2003–2004), and as the director of the human rights education programme at the European Roma Rights Centre (1998–2003) in Budapest, Hungary. Moreover, she was the founding director of the Romaversitas programme (1996) in Budapest, which offers a scholarship
Alex Maws
is Head of Educational Grants and Projects at the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR), the largest dedicated funder of programmes which promote teaching and learning about the Holocaust in the United Kingdom. In this capacity, he engages with a range of organizations to promote good practice across the Holocaust education and remembrance sectors. From 2007–2017, he worked at the Holocaust Educational Trust, developing training programmes for teachers and educational resources used by thousands of British schools. He has led nearly 50 study visits to Holocaust sites for teachers and students. Alex continues to serve as Education Advisor to the Holocaust Educational Trust. He is a member and former Chair of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) Education Working Group and served on the Board of Directors of the British Association of Holocaust Studies from 2013–2016. He earned an MA in Social Justice & Education from the University of London-Institute of Education and a BA in Political Science from the University of Michigan.
Fiona McConnell
PhD, is Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. She holds a BA in Geography from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD from Queen Mary, University of London. As a political geographer, Fiona’s research aims to develop new areas of thinking regarding governance beyond the state and different modes of political legitimacy. In particular, she is interested in how communities officially excluded from formal state politics are nevertheless engaging with aspects of statecraft, and in using such seemingly anomalous cases as a lens to critically examine the ‘norms’ of governance. Her doctoral and post-doctoral research focused on the political institutions and practices of the exile Tibetan government based in India, an institution which engages in state-like functions despite being legally unrecognised and lacking jurisdiction over territory. Her current research focuses on the practices and pedagogy of diplomacy in the margins and in 2017 she held a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for a project titled ‘Representing the unrepresented: the politics and practices of subaltern diplomacy’. Fiona is author of Rehearsing the State: the political practices of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile (Chichester: Wiley, 2016), co-editor of Geographies of Peace (London: IB Tauris, 2013) and Diplomatic Cultures and International Politics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016) and has published in journals
Louise Métrich
holds a French-German double degree in political sciences from the Institute of Political Sciences of Lille and the University of Münster, and an MA in “Identity, Culture and Power” from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. During her studies, she focused on the political integration of Roma in Romania as well as representations of marginality. Louise interned at the Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities in Cluj-Napoca, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation office in Bucharest and the French Democratic Confederation of Labour in Paris, before working as a human rights and civil society officer at the Embassy of France to the Czech Republic. She worked for several years as a Programme Manager at the Tom Lantos Institute, where she was in charge of Roma Rights and Citizenship and later on Human and Minority Rights Programme. She is currently deputy director of the Brussels branch of Vie Féminine, a 100-year old Belgium grassroots women’s organization that works specifically with impoverished and migrant women.
Arie Nadler
PhD (Psychology, Purdue University, USA), is a Full Professor of Social Psychology at the Tel Aviv University. He served as the Head of the Psychology Department (1984–1988) and Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Tel Aviv University (1993–1998). He co-founded the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research and served as the first head of its academic committee (1992–2002), and established and was the first head of the Institute for Diplomacy and Regional Cooperation at Tel Aviv University (1999–2003). Since 2000, Professor Nadler holds the Argentina Chair for Research of Psychology of Conflict and Cooperation. Funds to establish the Chair were donated by the Argentinean Friends of Tel Aviv University. Since May 2006, Professor Nadler serves as the Chairperson of the board of the Israeli Trustees Foundation, which supports research in the social sciences and education in Israeli Universities and Colleges. Professor Nadler also served as the chairperson of ISEF (Israeli Sepharadic Education Foundation) and Yeladim. Professor Nadler
Erzsébet Anita Német
holds a graduate degree in Sociology and Social Anthropology from Central European University. Erzsébet gained professional experience at various organizations in the fields of applied research, different aspects of social integration and in human rights. She participated in the multi-sited comparative, international research of the European Roma Rights Centre that aimed at collecting ethnographic data on the access, quality and affordability of water supplies in poor neighbourhoods inhabited by Roma. As a research fellow at the Snétberger Foundation, she investigated the living conditions of talented young Roma and developed their talent management strategy. Erzsébet was the Programme Manager for Roma Rights and Citizenship at the Tom Lantos Institute. Her current research interests focus on spatial dimensions of inequalities, dynamics of sub-regional development, and the way poverty is produced, reproduced and resisted at the local level.
Szilvia Rézműves
heads the Social Inclusion Unit of the Partners Hungary Foundation and coordinates the project entitled “Together for better health, for us with us”, supported by GlaxoSmithKline, a global healthcare company that aims to provide better access to health services for Roma people through mediation. She is also the coordinator of the “TOY for Inclusion” project which opened a Community Play Hub in a Hungarian village to improve the early childhood education of Roma children. She obtained her Master’s degree in social policy from the Eötvös Lóránd University Faculty of Social Sciences. In 2012, she was a research fellow at the Center for Policy Studies at Central European University where her research analyzed the effect of the Public Education Act on Roma children. She is currently participating in the accredited mediation course managed by Partners Hungary Foundation. Between 2014 and 2017, she was the national project officer of the ROMED2 joint program of the Council of Europe and European Commission which promotes Roma participation and democratic governance.
Gergely Romsics
PhD, is senior research fellow at the Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences and teaches at the Department of Social Science at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. He holds graduate degrees from Eötvös Loránd University and Central European University. He submitted his
Gaetano Pentassuglia
PhD, teaches international law and human rights at the University of Liverpool, UK, where he is also School Director of Postgraduate Research within the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. He has published widely in the field, especially on human rights issues relating to minority groups, including indigenous peoples, and broader aspects of public international law. He has taught at several universities such as Munich, Lund, Toronto, Palermo, Milano-Bicocca, and the European University Institute in Florence, and was recently a Visiting Professor at the University of Deusto (Bilbao, Spain). His latest books include Ethno-Cultural Diversity and Human Rights: Challenges and Critiques (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2018); Minority Groups and Judicial Discourse in International Law: A Comparative Perspective (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2009); and Minorities in International Law: An Introductory Study (Flensburg: ecmi, 2002), among several other leading works. He is Co-Editor of the International Journal on Minority and Group Rights and serves on the Advisory Boards of Europa Ethnica and Human Rights and Identity. He has acted as consultant to a number of international and non-governmental institutions and is a former member of the International Law Association Committee on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. He is also a frequent contributor to online magazines and discussion forums.
István Gergő Székely
PhD, is a researcher at the Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities and a lecturer at the Faculty of Political, Administrative and
Evelin Verhás
is Head of Programmes at the Tom Lantos Institute. Evelin holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley and a Master’s degree in Human Rights from the London School of Economics, where her research centred on international human rights law, transitional justice and international criminal law. Evelin began her career working as an intern at Minority Rights Group Europe in Budapest and Amnesty International in London. From 2010 to September 2016, she worked in the conflict prevention team and the legal department at Minority Rights Group International (MRG) in London. She was responsible for delivering programmes aiming to promote and protect rights of minority communities in Europe, East-Africa, Middle East and North Africa, and South-East Asia through strengthening their voices at national and international level through advocacy and litigation and building their capacity at grassroots through training. From 2013 to 2016, Evelin coordinated MRG’s anti-discrimination project in Bosnia and Herzegovina and worked on the implementation of the ground-breaking judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Sejdić and Finci v. BiH, addressing constitutionally entrenched discrimination against minorities. Since 2018, she is a Managing Editor of the series International Studies in Human Rights and Identity published by Brill/Nijhoff Academic Publishers.