Language: English

Originally from Australia, Miranda Sissons is a long-time human rights defender. She has 20-plus years’ experience in human rights work, and is currently Senior Director of Human Rights Policy at Meta Platforms. 

A former diplomat, Sissons has worked at Human Rights Watch, the International Center for Transitional Justice, and the social impact agency Purpose. She has consulted for the UN Human Rights Office. She has extensive on the ground experience with local and global organizations Timor Leste, Israel Palestine, Egypt, Iraq and elsewhere. 

She has published on topics ranging from international criminal law and the law of armed conflict to transitional justice and sexual and reproductive rights. She has co-led initiatives that have won multiple Cannes and Webby awards.

Sissons has also taught human rights/transitional justice at NYU and the City University of New York. She studied at the University of Melbourne, was a Fulbright scholar at Yale, and recently studied organizational leadership at the Said School of Business at Oxford.  She speaks Arabic, German and English. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

Johan Vibe has dedicated over three decades to diplomacy and international relations. After completing law school at the University of Oslo in 1989, he joined the Foreign Service, beginning with legal work at the International Court of Justice before taking on postings in Central America and NATO Brussels and serving as advisor at the Foreign Minister’s Cabinet.

His expertise in conflict resolution became the defining aspect of his career during his leadership of Norway’s Section for Peace and Reconciliation from 2005 to 2009, where he oversaw several peace processes including Colombia, Spain and Afghanistan. This specialisation led to his appointment as Norway’s Ambassador to Colombia from 2016 to 2018, where he played a crucial role in implementing the historic 2016 peace accords between the Government of Colombia and FARC.

Vibe’s distinguished diplomatic career includes serving as Minister and Deputy Chief of Mission in Washington DC, Ambassador to Spain, and Ambassador to Italy from 2021 to 2025. In August 2025, he assumed the position of Director of the Norwegian Centre for Conflict Resolution (NOREF), bringing his extensive experience in peace processes and high-level diplomatic leadership to this influential international role.

Dr Leor Zmigrod is a political psychologist and neuroscientist, and author of The Ideological Brain. Her research centres on what makes some individuals most susceptible to extreme and dogmatic ideologies.

She studied at Cambridge University as a Gates Scholar before winning a Junior Research Fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge. She has held visiting fellowships at Stanford, Harvard, and both the Berlin and Paris Institutes for Advanced Study. She was listed on ‘Forbes 30 Under 30’ in Science and has won numerous prizes, including the Women of the Future Science Award and the Glushko Prize.

Dr Zmigrod’s popular science book The Ideological Brain reveals the psychological and neurobiological traits that predispose some minds to extremism as well as the ways in which immersion in rigid ideologies might transform our brains and bodies. The book is being translated into over 15 languages and has been recognised as one of the most hotly anticipated non-fiction books of 2025 by The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, New Scientist, and Financial Times.

Dr. Augustine Magolowondo is a seasoned governance and democracy expert with over 25 years of experience in international development, focusing on elections, political party strengthening, political dialogue, and conflict management across sub-Saharan Africa. Until May 2025, he served as Regional Director and Head of Programmes for Democracy Works Foundation, and as Chief of Party for a USAID-funded regional political parties and elections programme covering seven Southern African countries.

Dr. Magolowondo has provided strategic advisory support to political parties, parliaments, EMBs, and civil society actors. He previously held senior leadership roles with the Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy (NIMD), where as African regional representative and Senior Expert (Political Parties and Elections) he provided expert leadership and oversight on initiatives aimed at promoting inter-party dialogue, political parties strengthening and elections.

He has also worked with GIZ in Malawi as an expert on decentralisation, conflict management, and dialogue promotion. He has contributed to seminal tools including the International IDEA/NIMD Facilitators’ Guide for Political Dialogue among others. He holds a PhD in Political Science, an MA in Development Management (from Ruhr University of Bochum, Germany) and BA in Public Administration (University of Malawi). He has published extensively in his field of work.

Andreas Schedler is a Senior Research Fellow at the Democracy Institute of the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest where he leads the Research Group on De- and Re-Democratisation. He is also a Visiting Professor at CEU Vienna. 

Before joining the CEU, Schedler was a Professor of Political Science at the Center for Economic Teaching and Research (CIDE) in Mexico City. A leading comparative scholar of democracy, democratisation, and authoritarianism, he has published numerous articles in scholarly journals including Comparative Political Studies, Perspectives on Politics, Journal of Democracy, European Journal of Political Research, Party Politics, Journal of Political Philosophy, Political Research Quarterly, and Political Science Quarterly. 

He is also author of “The Politics of Uncertainty: Sustaining and Subverting Electoral Authoritarianism” (Oxford University Press, 2013) and “In the Fog of War: Citizens and Organized Criminal Violence in Mexico” (CIDE, 2nd ed. 2018, in Spanish). His current research focuses on political polarisation and the destruction of basic democratic trust.

Aries A. Arugay is Professor of Political Science at the University of the Philippines Diliman. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Asian Politics & Policy, a Scopus-indexed academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell and the Policy Studies Organization and a Visiting Senior Fellow and Coordinator of the Philippines Studies Programme of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies-Yusof-Ishak Institute (Singapore).

He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on comparative politics and international relations. He is one of the first members of the Democracy Erosion Consortium, an global initiative to commonly offer a university-level course on democratic erosion around the world. Since 2024, Arugay is also a member of the Global Challenges to Democracy Working Group established by the Toda Peace Institute.

Arugay has conducted research on democratisation and democratic erosion for the past two decades. His research interests include civil-military relations, populism, polarisation, electoral politics, and foreign policy. He obtained his PhD in Political Science from Georgia State University (United States) in 2014 as a Fulbright Fellow and his MA and BA (cum laude) in Political Science from the University of the Philippines-Diliman.

Dicky Sofjan, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Indonesian Consortium for Religious Studies (ICRS) in the Graduate School of Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) in Yogyakarta. His research focuses on religion and politics, Islam, religious literacy and social justice, nature and culture, as well as sustainability and spirituality. He currently serves as  Vice President of Globethics in Geneva, Switzerland. 

Dr. Sofjan has received research grants from the Ford Foundation, Templeton Foundation, Partnership for Religion and Sustainable Development (PaRD), Nippon Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, European Union, US State Department, Carnegie Council, Greenpeace, UNDP and other international organisations and development agencies. He was a Visiting Professor and Fellow in Japan, Malaysia, Bulgaria, Italy and Iran. 

Dr. Sofjan’s latest project includes designing and curating an inspirational and sustainable “Nglanggeran Eco-Village” located in Patuk, Gunung Kidul, where he brings together Indonesian social entrepreneurs and green investors to promote sustainable development.. 

Dr. Sofjan serves as ICRS Principal Investigator for a Religious Literacy Project with the Indonesian Institute of Academic Partnership (IIAP) and a Co-Principal Investigator for the Project on Polarization Mitigation through Social and Environmental Justice in Indonesia.

Jestina Mukoko is a distinguished human rights defender, journalist, peace advocate, and civil society leader. She founded the Jestina Mukoko Foundation to provide a sanctuary and platform for those affected by trauma to share their stories as the initial step in their journey of healing and restoration. As former National Director of Zimbabwe Peace Project, a non-profit organisation, She has been dedicated to promoting sustainable peace by tracking and reporting human rights abuses and breaches of peace across Zimbabwe.

 A survivor of state-sponsored violence, Mukoko bravely documented her harrowing experience in her book, The Abduction and Trial of Jestina Mukoko: The Fight for Human Rights in Zimbabwe, published in 2016. 

A political scientist by training, Mukoko holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Defending Human Rights, and an Executive Master’s Degree in Managing Peace and Security in Africa. For her outstanding contributions to democracy, human rights, and peace advocacy, the Institute of Directors Zimbabwe honored her as one of the 50 Inspirational Women of 2020-2021. 

Mukoko has been engaged in work to analyse fault lines impacting cohesion in the opposition in Zimbabwe. She has been a member of the IFIT Zimbabwe Resources Group since its inception in 2016.

Sawsan Abou Zainedin is the Chief Executive Officer of Madaniya, a Syrian-led initiative uniting over 240 civil society organisations to reclaim political agency within Syria’s civic space. Trained as an architect and urban planner, Abou Zainedin brings over a decade of experience in the development sector, applying a multidisciplinary lens to the challenges of the Syrian conflict.

Before leading Madaniya, she worked with a wide range of international and Syrian organisations. She has delivered guest lectures at academic institutions such as UCL, McGill, and the University of Bath, and published research with leading think tanks including Chatham House and Carnegie Middle East Center.

Abou Zainedin is a member of GIZ’s Experts Network on Housing, Land, and Property Rights and IFIT’s Syria Resource Group. She has co-founded several community-based initiatives, including Hooz Centre in Syria and Sakan Housing Communities in the UK.

A Chevening scholar, she holds an MSc in Urban Development Planning from UCL, a postgraduate diploma from Erasmus University, and a degree in architectural engineering from the University of Aleppo. Her work bridges civic leadership, urban justice, and post-conflict recovery.

Sulemana Braimah is the Executive Director of the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA), West Africa’s most influential freedom of expression advocacy and media development non-profit organisation. He is an experienced, visionary and transformational non-profit leader with over 15 years of experience. He is skilled in non-profit management, building talents, policy analysis, strategic planning and innovation, with extensive networks in Africa and globally. 

Braimah is a 2019 Global Eisenhower Fellow in recognition of his exceptional leadership; and the 2023 recipient of the coveted Eisenhower Fellowships Impact Award, in recognition of the extraordinary impact of The Fourth Estate non-profit journalism project, which he founded in 2021.

 At the regional level, Braimah serves as the Secretary General of the ECOWAS Civil Society Platform on Transparency and Accountability in Governance (ECSOPTAG).