Guest Lecturers

Nnimmo Bassey is an activist with Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth, Nigeria. Bassey is an environmentalist, activist and poet, elected chair of Friends of the Earth International and Executive Director of Environmental Rights Action. He is one of Time magazine's Heroes of the Environment 2009. In 2010, Nnimmo Bassey was named co-winner of the Right Livelihood Award, and in 2012 he was awarded the Rafto Prize "in recognition of his long-term fight for people’s right to life, health, food and water in a world affected by complex and threatening climate change and mass environmental destruction."

Christophe Béné is a research fellow in the Vulnerability and Poverty Reduction team at the Institute of Development Studies in Denmark. He is a socio-economist and policy analyst with more than 15 years of experience in developing countries. Through inter-disciplinary research his work has been focusing on poverty, vulnerability and food security, initially through analysis of the socio-political economy of natural resources in rural areas. He has worked in the Center for Economic and Management of Aquatic Resources at the University of Portsmouth (UK) and for the World Fish Center - one of the 15 centers of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

Marge Berer is the founding editor of Reproductive Health Matters. She has been an advocate for abortion rights and sexual and reproductive health and rights since 1976, given numerous presentations and lectures, organised national and international conferences and workshops, and published many papers in the field. She is on the coordination team of the International Campaign for Women’s Right to Safe Abortion and was chair of the Steering Committee of the International Consortium for Medical Abortion from 2002-2011. She has also been chair of Voice for Choice in the UK, and first chairwoman of the Gender Advisory Panel, WHO Department of Reproductive Health and Research. She received the Olivia Schieffelin Nordberg Award for Excellence in Writing and Editing in the Population Sciences in 2007.

Adam Branch is Associated Professor in the Department of Political Science, San Diego State University, and Senior Research Fellow at the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Kampala, Uganda. Branch’s work on political violence and international intervention culminated in the book, Displacing Human Rights: War and Intervention in Northern Uganda, as well as numerous articles and chapters on subjects including the International Criminal Court, humanitarianism, and regional security. He is currently completing a book on the recent wave of popular protest in Africa. Branch is also senior researcher on the project 'Beyond Criminal Justice Towards a New Paradigm for the Political Settlement of Africa’s Conflicts' and is coordinating the NORHED-project 'Building and Reflecting on Interdisciplinary MPhil/PhD Studies for Higher Education Transformation' in partnership with UiB Global.

Olivier De Schutter is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. He is also a Member of the Advisory Group of the Committee on World Food Security of FAO. Mr De Schutter is a Professor at the Catholic University of Louvain and at the College of Europe (Natolin), and also a Member of the Global Law School Faculty at New York University and a Visiting Professor at Columbia University. In 2013, he was awarded the Francqui Prize for this contribution to the advancement of social sciences and the humanities.

Umut Erel is Lecturer in Sociology at Open University, UK. Erel’s research interests are in migration, ethnicity, gender and class, culture and representation empirically and theoretically. She has explored issues of intersectionality, the social construction of skill and notions of belonging in recent research projects (e.g. on Refugee Women in London’s voluntary sector and on migration and cohesion in the context of the East of England). She is interested in how these issues play out in practices of citizenship, differentiated along gender and ethnic lines.

Varun Gauri is Senior Economist with the Development Research Group of the World Bank and Co-director of the World Development Report 2015. His current research examines how legal institutions and conceptions of justice and human rights affect human welfare. His publications includes Courting Social Justice: The Judicial Enforcement of Social and Economics Rights in the Developing World and his research has been chronicled in The Economist, the Washington Post, and the Indian Express. He has been engaged in projects and policy dialogue in a number of countries, including Bangladesh, Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Egypt, India, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Timor-Leste, and Zimbabwe.

Amanda Gouws is Professor of Political Science at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. Gouws' specialization is South African politics and gender politics. Her research focuses on women and citizenship, the National Gender Machinery and representation. She is the editor of (Un)Thinking Citizenship: Feminist Debates in Contemporary South Africa.  She has been a Visiting Professor at Northwestern University, USA, and a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation Centre in Bellagio, Italy. She is a Commissioner for the South African Commission on Gender Equality.

Nobuo Hayashi is a former Legal Officer at the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (2000-2006). Currently he is a Researcher at PluriCourts Centre for the study of the legitimacy of the international judiciary at the University of Oslo Law Faculty.

Zaid Hassan is the co-founder of Reos Partners, where he currently serves as Managing Partner of the Oxford office. Reos Partners is a social innovation consultancy that addresses complex, high-stakes challenges around the world. Zaid has over a decade of experience in developing strategic responses to complex social challenges, including aboriginal issues, climate change, child malnutrition, employment, energy, financial systems, global food systems, and security issues. He has a background in technology and communications and has extensive start-up experience.

Bjørn Hersoug is Lecturer at Norwegian College of Fishery Science (NCFS). Hersoug has had several positions at NCFS, including leader of the institute and Rector of the college for two periods. For ten years, he headed the study board of the International Fisheries Management (IFM), and served in a number of program committees in the Norwegian Research Council. He has also served on numerous boards, among them the board of the Norwegian-South African fisheries cooperation (NORSA).

Tina Gudrun Jensen Researcher at the Danish National Centre for Social Research. Jensen’s main areas of interest are ethnic minorities, social integration, inter-ethnic relations and cultural complexity. She has carried out research among Muslim movements in Denmark, focusing on the construction of Danish-Muslim identities, relations between Muslims and Danes, and the question of value changes. Another area of research is the interface between gender, culture and violence. She is currently engaged in an international publication on models for dealing with multi-ethnicity and social integration in six European countries. She is also part of a research project on masculinities among ethnic minorities.

Jamshed Kazi is Director of the Oslo Governance Centre of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Mr. Kazi’s professional experience has spanned across East Africa, Asia and the Pacific and Europe in the fields of programme development and management, democratic governance, human rights, and environmental policy with several UN agencies, international treaty bodies and NGOs.

Gary D Libecap is Professor of Corporate Environmental Management and Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. Libecap is also Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, MA, Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Senior Fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center, PERC, Bozeman, Montana. His research focuses on the role of property rights institutions in addressing the “Tragedy of the Commons.” Current research addresses the demarcation of land, water rights and water markets for water allocation and management, and use of rights-based arrangements in fisheries.

Zsolt G. Pataki is research administrator/economic analyst at the European Parliament's research service. His main focus is to assess European added value of economic and policy options, and to prepare cost of non-Europe evaluations. Before that he coordinated modelling activities and scientific inputs to impact assessments run by the European Commission, at the Joint Research Centre - the Commission's in-house science service. Zsolt has also managed a multidisciplinary team for external relations and politico-economic analyses at DG Energy. He has background in physics, economics and geopolitics, and taught at several universities in Hungary and France.

Srila Roy is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. Her research/teaching interests include post-colonial feminism, social movements, violence and conflict, and memory, emotions and trauma studies–many of which take as their starting point the contemporary political history of India and South Asia. She is the author of Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence and Subjectivity in India’s Naxalbari Movement and editor of New South Asian feminism: paradoxes and possibilities.

John-Arne Røttingen is Professor II at Institute for Health and Society at the University of Oslo. He is currently Visiting Professor at the Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard School of Public Health, USA. Røttingen’s research focuses on    health policy and health systems with emphasis on how evidence can inform decision making. He also works on global health/international health, with particular emphasis on health system research and access to and innovation of medicines and other health technologies for the needs of developing countries.

Helle Rydström is Professor in Gender Studies at the Department of Gender Studies at Lund University, Sweden, Rydström’s research covers intimately intertwined topics in Vietnam, India, Nepal, and Cambodia. She examines how gender informs violence, security, and vulnerability in social life and in sites of conflict and war. She studies how gendered power relations facilitate configurations of family life, sexuality, and education. Rydström has conducted anthropological fieldwork in Vietnam, India and Nepal.

Andrea Saltelli is Head of the Econometrics and Applied Statistics Unit at the Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen (IPSC) at the European Commission Joint Research Centre in Italy. Saltelli is an expert in the generation of compound indicators for various European Union offices, and in sensitivity analysis. His main focus is on sensitivity analysis of model output, a discipline where statistical tools are used to interpret the output from mathematical or computational models.

Jeroen van der Sluijs is Associate Professor at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University. He is also a Senior Researcher at Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities, University of Bergen, Norway. His research interests involves multidisciplinary approaches for understanding scientific controversies about environmental and health risks to better communicate scientific uncertainties from scientists to policy makers . Hi is especially interested in complex risks such as climate change, nanoparticles, electromagnetic fields, or bee mortality. He is particularly fascinated by issues that are characterized by both large scientific uncertainties as great social conflicts.

Asuncion Lera St. Clair is Senior Principal Scientist at the Low Carbon Future Programme, DNV GL, Norway. St. Clair is a philosopher and sociologist with research interests focused on climate change, critical poverty studies, development and climate ethics, human rights, global justice, sociology of knowledge, social studies of science, social theory, social and political philosophy, climate philosophy, and multilateral organizations.

Christina Voigt is Professor at the Department of Public and International Law, University of Oslo, Norway. Voigt is project coordinator for the environmental sector at 'The Legitimate Roles of the Judiciary in the Global Order' (Pluricourts) Centre of Excellence at the University of Oslo. She is an editor of several journals and was the lead negotiator on REDD (Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries) for the Norwegian government in the UN climate negotiations.