Naila Kabeer
Professor of Gender and Development
Department of Gender Studies, LSE
Naila Kabeer is Professor of Gender and Development at the Department of International Development. Naila is also a Faculty Associate at LSE’s International Inequalities Institute and on the governing board of the Atlantic Fellowship for Social and Economic Equity. She has done extensive advisory work with international agencies (World Bank, ADB, UNDP, UN Women), bilateral agencies (DFID, SIDA, CIDA, IDRC) and NGOs (Oxfam, Action Aid, BRAC, PRADAN and Nijera Kori). Her most recent projects were supported by ERSC-DIFD Funded Research on Poverty Alleviation: Gender and Labour Market dynamics in Bangladesh and West Bengal. She is on the editorial boards of Feminist Economics and Gender and Development and on the international advisory board of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies She is also a member of the Inequalities Advisory Group, Bosch Foundation and a member of the Advisory Board of the United Nations University Institute for Global Health.
Stefan Dercon
Professor of Economic Policy
University of Oxford
Stefan Dercon is Professor of Economic Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and the Economics Department, and a Fellow of Jesus College. He is also Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies. He combines his academic career with work as a policy advisor, providing strategic economic and development advice, and promoting the use of evidence in decision making. Between 2011 and 2017, he was Chief Economist of the Department of International Development (DFID), the government department in charge with the UK’s aid policy and spending. Between 2020-2022, he was the Development Policy Advisor to successive Foreign Secretaries at the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. His research interests concern what keeps some people and countries poor: the failures of markets, governments and politics, mainly in Africa, and how to achieve change.
Steven Wilkinson
Professor of Political Science and International Affairs
Yale University
Steven I. Wilkinson (Ph.D., MIT) is Nilekani Professor of India and South Asian Studies and Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at Yale University, where he is also Henry R. Luce Director of the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. In addition he serves as Vice Provost for Global Strategy. From 2021-22, he served as Acting Dean of Social Science. Before coming to Yale, he taught at the University of Chicago and at Duke University.
He has worked on political conflict in India, and his first book on that topic, Votes and Violence (Cambridge, 2004), won the 2005 Woodrow Wilson Award for the best book on Politics, Government and International Affairs. He is also interested in corruption in politics, and co-edited the book Patrons, Clients or Politics: Patterns of Political Accountability and Competition (Cambridge, 2007) with Herbert Kitschelt. His most recent book is Army and Nation, which came out in January 2015 from Harvard University Press (Permanent Black in South Asia), and examines India’s success in managing the imbalanced colonial army it inherited in 1947. He is currently working with Saumitra Jha (Stanford GSB) on a book on War and Political Change, and with Sushant Singh (CPR) on a new book on India’s changing defence structure.
Amaney Jamal
Dean, School of Public and International Affairs
Princeton University
Amaney Jamal is Dean of the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) and the Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Politics. She joined the Princeton faculty in 2003.
Jamal’s research and teaching focuses on the Middle East and North Africa, political development and democratization, inequality and economic segregation, Muslim immigration in the United States and Europe, and issues related to gender, race, religion and class.
She previously served in numerous leadership roles on campus, including as chair of the Department of Politics Ad-Hoc Committee on Race and Diversity and as a member of the Dean of the Faculty Committee on Diversity. Jamal also directs the Workshop on Arab Political Development and the Bobst-American University of Beirut Collaborative Initiative.
Among her many awards and fellowships, Jamal was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020, received the distinguished Kuwait Prize for the field of economics and social science in 2019, and was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2005. Outside of Princeton, she is the principal investigator of the Arab Barometer, a nonpartisan research network that measures public opinion through polling in North Africa and Middle East.
Jamal is an award-winning author and has published numerous journal articles and scholarly papers. Her books include “Of Empires and Citizens: Pro-American Democracy or No Democracy at All” and “Barriers to Democracy: The Other Side of Social Capital in Palestine and the Arab World.” Before coming to Princeton, Jamal was an assistant professor of political science at Columbia University. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan.