Expert Team: Inclusive Narratives Practice Group

Joseph Asunka is Chief Executive Officer of Afrobarometer, a pan-African survey research network that conducts public attitude surveys on democracy, governance, the economy and social issues across the continent. He has served in this role since April 2021. He previously worked as Program Officer in the Global Development and Population Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, as Lecturer in Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and as Program Officer at the Ghana Center for Democratic Development, where he also served as Afrobarometer’s data manager.

Joseph is a political scientist whose work focuses on democracy, governance, elections, distributive politics, migration and citizen participation in Africa. His research and leadership have contributed to strengthening public-opinion research and evidence-based policymaking across the continent. His work has appeared in journals including British Journal of Political Science, Research and Politics, and Population Research and Policy Review. 

He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, as well as degrees in Statistics and Computer Science and in Economics from the University of Ghana. 

Areas of expertise: democracy, governance, social justice, civic engagement, political participation.

Rita Manchanda is Adjunct Professor at Chanakya National Law School, Patna. She previously served for fifteen years as Executive Director of the South Asia Forum for Human Rights in Kathmandu. She has also worked as a consultant with UN Women, a gender advisor to the Commonwealth Technical Fund, a founding member of the Women’s Regional Network, a board member of the International Journal of Transitional Justice and the Sanchal Foundation, and co-chair of the Pakistan India Forum for Peace and Democracy.

Rita is a feminist scholar, author and advocate for human rights, peace and social justice in South Asia. Her work has paid particular attention to the rights of vulnerable and marginalised groups, including women and religious and ethnic minorities. She has made major contributions to debates on gender, security and foreign policy through publications such as Women, War and Peace in South Asia: Beyond Victimhood to Agency (2001), Women and the Politics of Peace in South Asia: Narratives of Militarisation, Power and Justice (2017), and “Difficult Encounters with the WPS Agenda in South Asia” (2020), among other books, articles and chapters. 

Her research on gendered narratives of conflict and peacebuilding in Northeast India and Kashmir has been especially influential, and she has developed important frameworks for peace audits and empirical research on peace processes in South Asia. More recently, her work has focused on forced displacement, including internally displaced persons and refugees in the region.

Areas of expertise: gender, conflicts, peace, militarization, South Asia, human rights, identity struggles, democracy, refugees.

Ja Ian Chong is Associate Professor of Political Science at the National University of Singapore and a non-resident scholar with Carnegie China. He previously worked with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, and the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies in Singapore, and was a Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program Fellow.

Ian’s work spans international relations, comparative politics, and political sociology, with a particular focus on security issues related to China and East Asia. He closely examines the interplay of social movements, politics, foreign policy, and coercive diplomacy in the region. His research has received support from the East-West Center, the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, the Sasakawa Foundation, the Singapore Ministry of Education, the Social Science Research Council, and the Woodrow Wilson Circle of Fellows.

He is the author of External Intervention and the Politics of State Formation: China, Indonesia, and Thailand, 1893–1952 (Cambridge University Press 2012), which received the 2013–14 Best Book Award from the International Security Studies Section of the International Studies Association. His work has also appeared in journals including The China Quarterly, European Journal of International Relations, International Security, and Security Studies.

Areas of expertise: security, nationalism, contentious politics, coercive diplomacy, external intervention, and conflict.

Paula Miraglia is Founder and CEO of Momentum–Journalism & Tech, a global initiative focused on the relationship between big tech platforms and the news industry. She is also Co-founder and Publisher of Gama Revista and previously spent eight years directing Nexo Jornal, which she co-founded.

Paula is a social scientist and media entrepreneur dedicated to building sustainable, high-integrity news ecosystems in the digital age. She has served as a consultant for the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, and in 2013 she was recognised as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World for Reducing Gun Violence for her work with international organisations. Paula currently serves on the boards of the Center for News Technology and Innovation, the International Press Institute, the Brazilian Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, Data Privacy Brasil, and Lighthouse Reports.

She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of São Paulo and is a Sulzberger Fellow at Columbia University.

Areas of expertise: media, technology, digital communication, artificial intelligence, social change, democracy and governance.

Solon Simmons is full professor and the director of The Narrative Transformation Lab (TNT Lab) at George Mason University’s Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution. A sociologist by training, he is the author many books and articles on narrative and storytelling in peace and politics, including Conflict Resolution after the Pandemic Building Peace, Pursuing Justice (2021), Root Narrative Theory and Conflict Resolution; Power, Justice and Values (2020), The Eclipse of Equality: Arguing America on Meet the Press (2013), and, most recently, Narrating Peace: How to Tell a Conflict Story (2024) and The Handbook of Social and Political Conflict (coming 2025). At TNT Lab, Solon is leading efforts to develop cutting-edge narrative tools for use in practical applications in both adversarial struggles for justice and collaborative journeys toward peace. 

Solon served as interim dean for the Carter School in 2013 and Vice President for Global Strategy for George Mason from 2014 to 2017. He is currently President of the Faculty Senate. He teaches classes on the craft of peace writing, conflict theory, narrative, media, discourse and conflict, human rights, quantitative and qualitative methodology, global conflict, and critical theory.

Areas of expertise: story structure, psychometrics, discourse analysis, social theory, political strategy.

Dr. Sara Cobb is Professor Emerita at the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University, where she was also the director for eight years. In this context, she teaches and conducts research on the relationship between narrative and conflict. She is also the Director of the Center for the Study of Narrative and Conflict Resolution at the Carter School, which provides a hub for scholarship on narrative approaches to conflict analysis and resolution.

Dr. Cobb is widely published. Her book, Speaking of Violence: The Politics and Poetics of Narrative in Conflict Resolution (Oxford University Press) lays out the theoretical basis for a narrative lens on both conflict analysis and conflict resolution; this perspective presumes that conflict is a struggle over meaning, anchored in and by the stories we tell. Formerly Executive Director of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, she has been a leader in the fields of negotiation and conflict resolution studies, conducting narrative research on adaptive governance, serious games, resilient communities and sustainable systems. Currently, she is conducting research on conflict prevention in the Arctic.