Adeoye O. Akinola is Head of Research and Teaching at the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation (IPATC) at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He obtained a PhD in Political Science from the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in South Africa. Dr Akinola was a lecturer at Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria; a Post-doctoral Fellow at UKZN and the University of Zululand; and a visiting professor at the United Nations University for Peace (UPEACE) Africa Programme in Addis Ababa. He is the author and editor of several books, including, Globalization, Democracy and Oil Sector Reform in Nigeria (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and The Political Economy of Xenophobia in Africa (Springer, 2018). He specialises in globalisation, African political economy, development studies, resource governance, and conflict and peace studies.

Jesper Bjarnesen has been a senior researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute (NAI) in Uppsala, Sweden, since September 2013, and an Associate Professor at the University of Uppsala. He holds a Master’s degree in Anthropology and another in African Regional Studies from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Uppsala. He has worked primarily on the grey zones between forced and voluntary migration in West Africa, in the context of the 2002–11 civil war in Côte d’Ivoire. He has researched the generational variations of displacement, the dynamics of integration among urban youths, and the broader themes of urban resettlement and transnational families. His current research focuses on the effects of migration governance in terms of the in/visibilities produced by specific legal statuses, and on the ‘soft infrastructures’ of labour mobilities across and between secondary cities in West Africa. He is the co-founder of the African Migration, Mobility, and Displacement (AMMODI) research network.