Notes on Contributors
Kenza Afsahi
is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Bordeaux and a researcher at the Emile Durkheim Center (cnrs) in France. She is co-responsible for the ‘Sociology of the International’ research focus at the Emile Durkheim Center, and member of the editorial board of the French Journal of Visual Methods (Revue française des méthodes visuelles). At the University of Bordeaux, Afsahi teaches the sociology of deviance, the sociology of the cannabis market, visual sociology, issues of women’s involvement in the drug market, and environmental crime.
Damon Barrett
is a co-founder of the International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy based at the Human Rights Centre at University of Essex. He is a lecturer at the School of Public Health and Community Medicine at the University of Gothenburg, and the author of Child Rights and Drug Control in International Law, published by Brill Nijhoff (2020).
David Bewley-Taylor
is a Professor of International Relations and Public Policy and the Founding Director of the Global Drug Policy Observatory (GDPO), Swansea University, UK. He has collaborated with and produced policy reports for a range of drug policy organisations beyond academia. At present, he is a Senior Associate of the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC) and a Research Fellow of the Transnational Institute’s (TNI) Drugs and Democracy Programme.
Daniel Brombacher
is the Head of the Global Partnership on Drug Policies and Development (gpdpd), a global programme at the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (giz), implemented on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (bmz) and under the political lead of the Federal Drug Commissioner. The programme is based in Berlin, Bonn, Bogotá, Tirana and Bangkok. Before joining giz, Brombacher worked at the German think tank, the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (swp), focusing on research and policy advice on drug policy and organised crime. He holds a Master’s degree in Political Science from the University of Freiburg and has published numerous articles, policy papers and books on organised crime, drugs and development policies.
Julia Buxton
is the British Academy Global Professor in Criminology at the University of Manchester, UK, and a Senior Research Associate at the Global Drug Policy Observatory (GDPO), Swansea University, UK. She is a co-editor of The Impact of Global Drug Policy on Women: Shifting the Needle, published by Emerald Press (2020) and several publications on drugs, development and Latin America.
Mary Chinery-Hesse
is the first woman Chancellor of the University of Ghana and a member of the West Africa Commission on Drugs. A retired international civil servant, she has worked at the United Nations as Resident Coordinator and United Nations Development Programme (undp) Resident Representative, serving in New York, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, the Seychelles and Uganda. The first African woman to be appointed to that position, she was then the first woman Deputy Director-General of the International Labour Organization (ilo). From May 2006 to January 2009, Chinery-Hesse served as the Chief Advisor to the President of the Republic of Ghana in the Cabinet of President J.A. Kufuor. Her training was in Sociology and Economics at the University of Ghana and Development Economics at the University of Dublin.
John Collins
is the Executive Director of the London School of Economics’s (lse) International Drug Policy Unit (idpu), a Fellow of the lse US Centre, and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Illicit Economies and Development, published by lse Press. His historical research focuses on the political economy of international drug control. Collins earned a PhD from the Department of International History at the London School of Economics (LSE), looking at Anglo-American relations and international drug control from 1939 to 1964, a period culminating in the creation of the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961. His contemporary policy interests focus on the political economy of international drug control and the evolving dynamics of national and international policy reforms.
Joanne Csete
is an Associate Professor of Population and Family Health at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York, where she directs the programme in Health and Human Rights. She was the Founding Director of the hiv and Human Rights Program at Human Rights Watch and the Executive Director of the Canadian hiv/aids Legal Network. Csete has written widely on drug-control policy and access to health services for criminalised populations.
Sarah David
has been working as an Advisor at the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (giz) since 2016, focusing on development- and health-oriented drug policies in Latin America and Central and Southeast Asia. David is a political scientist and holds a Master’s degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Hamburg. She has also worked with an ngo and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung in Mexico, as well as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (unodc) in Vienna.
Ann Fordham
is the Executive Director of the International Drug Policy Consortium (idpc) and over the last 10 years has built the network from 30 to over 190 organisations. She leads international advocacy efforts on drug policy and human rights and is the Chair of the Strategic Advisory Group to the United Nations on drug use and hiv. Fordham is regularly invited to comment on global drug policy issues in the media. She holds a Master’s degree in Human Rights from Sussex University, where she specialised in human rights and harm reduction.
Corina Giacomello
is a full-time Associate Researcher with the University of Chiapas, Mexico. She also works with the ngo equis Justice for Women and as a consultant. Her topics of research are gender, prison systems and alternatives to incarceration, drug policy, women in detention, women who use drugs, and children with incarcerated parents.
Martin Jelsma
is the Director of the Drugs and Democracy programme at the Transnational Institute (TNI, Amsterdam) and a Senior Research Associate at the Global Drug Policy Observatory (GDPO, Swansea University), working on the UN drug control system and links between drug policies, conflict, human rights and development, often in collaboration with small farmers of cannabis, coca and opium.
Sylvia Kay
is a Project Officer at the Agrarian and Environmental Justice programme of the Transnational Institute (TNI, Amsterdam). Her work focuses on issues around land and food politics, natural resource governance, rural development and agricultural investment. More recently, she has been engaged in debates around drugs and development and the prospects for fair(er) trade cannabis.
Diederik Lohman
is a Senior Adviser in the Public Health Program of the Open Society Foundations and a former Director of the Health and Human Rights division at Human Rights Watch.
David Mansfield
has conducted fieldwork in rural Afghanistan each year since 1997. One of the pre-eminent experts on the drugs economy and Afghan rural livelihoods, his research is an important source of primary data for policy analysts and academics. His recent work has moved up the value chain, offering unique insights into production laboratories and cross-border smuggling. Mansfield has been a technical adviser to the UK government and worked for the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and the European Commission. He is the author of A State Built on Sand: How Opium Undermined Afghanistan, published by Oxford University Press (2016).
José Ramos-Horta
is a former President of Timor-Leste, who has dedicated his adult life to fighting for his country’s independence. After independence in 2002, he served as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Defence, Prime Minister, and Minister of State and Counsellor for National Security. At the international level, he was the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative and Head of the United Nations Integrated Peacebuilding Office in Guinea-Bissau (uniogbis), before chairing the High Level Independent Panel on UN Peace Operations, and co-chairing the International Commission on Multilateralism (UN Reform). Ramos-Horta is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate for his ‘sustained efforts to hinder the oppression of a small people’ in Timor-Leste. A distinguished scholar of international law, human rights and peace studies, he is currently a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy (GCDP), of the Global Leadership Foundation, and of the Club de Madrid.
Tuesday Reitano
is the Deputy Director of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (
Andrew Scheibe
is a medical doctor by training and works in harm reduction research, programmes and policy in South Africa and the region. His work focuses on the intersections between infectious diseases, determinants of health, and rights. He is a Technical Advisor for tb hiv Care, a researcher at the University of Pretoria’s Department of Family Medicine, and a visiting professor at the Urban Futures Centre at the Durban University of Technology.
Shaun Shelly
is a researcher at the University of Pretoria, Department of Family Medicine; the Policy, Advocacy and Human Rights lead at tb hiv Care, and the Chair of the South African Network of People Who Use Drugs. He brings academic, programmatic, research, clinical and lived experiences together into a 360 degree view of the complex issues that inform understanding of and responses to the use of certain drugs, as well as the people who use them.
Khalid Tinasti
is the Executive Secretary of the Global Commission on Drug Policy (GCDP) and a Research and Teaching Fellow at the Global Studies Institute at the University of Geneva. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the Catholic University of Paris (ICP, France), and has held research fellowships at the Graduate Institute (Switzerland) and Swansea University (UK). Tinasti is the author of scientific papers and policy reports with a focus on public policies, democracy and the role of elections, and international drug control mechanisms.
Anna Versfeld
is an independent, South African medical anthropologist. Her work focuses on gender, infectious diseases and key populations, with a specialisation in the social dynamics of tuberculosis and substance use. Versfeld currently works with a variety of organisations involved in health research and project implementation, and focuses on exploring the ways in which health and healthcare services are understood and experienced by both service providers and those needing healthcare. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cape Town and a Technical Assistant to the Stop tb Partnership.