Dr Niki Alsford
Email: na29@soas.ac.uk
Prof. Alsford has extensive knowledge and experience working with Pacific Island nations. He is currently engaged in a longitudinal study of indigenous voices on climate change, and works closely with the Fijian community in the UK. He is Chair of the Austronesian Centre at the University of Central Lancashire and continues to work with the Council of Indigenous Peoples, Executive Yuan in Taiwan and the Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines in Taipei.
Dr Sinclair Dinnen
Email: Sinclair.Dinnen@anu.edu.au
Sinclair Dinnen has worked as an academic researcher and policy adviser in the SW Pacific for close to thirty years. He first visited Solomon Islands in the mid-1980s to deliver a short course to police prosecutors at the Police Training College in Honiara. Sinclair has a particular interest in issues of conflict, dispute resolution, legal pluralism, state-building and development in the Melanesian Pacific. Over the past 15 years he has been a regular visitor to Solomon Islands and has published extensively on that country’s recent experience of conflict and peacebuilding.
Dr Debra McDougall
Email: debra.mcdougall@uwa.edu.au
Debra McDougall is an anthropologist at the University of Western Australia, whose research has focused on Solomon Islands for nearly two decades. She conducted PhD research in the Western Province of Solomon Islands (on the island of Ranongga) over two years in 1998-2001 in the midst of a civil conflict known locally as “The Tensions.” Since then she has extended her rural research into urban areas. She has written an ethnohistorical study of intercultural relationships titled Engaging with Strangers: Love and Violence in the Rural Solomon Islands (Berghahn, 2016) and has expertise on issues of religion and politics, gender, land tenure, and conflict and peacemaking.
Professor Clive Moore
Email: c.moore@uq.edu.au
Cive Moore is a professor at the University of Queensland, Australia, and has 40 years’ experience as an acedemic researcher in the Solomon Islands. He first visited in 1976, researching his doctoral thesis on 19th century labour migration to Queensland and the diaspora community in Australia today. He has increasingly been interesed in the 20th and 21st centuries, publishing a book on the 1998-2003 small-scale civil war, and launching a web-based Solomon Islands Historical Encyclopaedia. He is an active media commentator of contemporary Soloman Islands, focusing on urban history.
Dr Rodolfo Maggio
Email: rodolfo.maggio@psych.ox.ac.uk
Rodolfo Maggio is an anthropologist currently holding a Postdoctoral Research position at The University of Oxford. In 2011/12 he conducted 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Solomon Islands. He mostly resided in Gilbert Camp, an unauthorised settlement of migrants on the outskirts of Honiara, and Malaita, the island of origin of the the majority of the settlers. He examined cases of witchcraft and sorcery accusation which took place during his stay, and was directly involved in one of these. These experiences provided him with important insights into the manifold connections between accusations of malevolent magic and issues such as land ownership, local animosities, and resource allocation. The collaboration of state agencies and local justice systems, he claims, can prevent these accusations from escalating into violence and consequent blood feuds. He is prepared to help lawyers in need of consultancy regarding sorcery and witchcraft in Solomon Islands and Melanesia more broadly.