At the time of this interview, Benson Bana was a senior lecturer on public administration and human resource management for the Research and Education for Democracy in Tanzania program at the University of Dar es Salaam. He also consulted and conducted research in the same fields. A Tanzanian citizen, Bana earned a doctorate from the University of Manchester in the U.K. He worked in the Tanzanian public service, and as a human resource training and development manager in a multinational company. 

At the time of this interview, Semboja Haji was a researcher at the Economic Research Bureau at the University of Dar es Salaam. Trained as an econometrician in Sweden and Norway, he later became a senior research fellow at the Economic and Social Research Foundation in Tanzania, where he worked for eight years. He helped develop the Tanzania 2025 Vision and Zanzibar 2020 Vision strategies, and had extensive experience advising the Tanzanian government in areas including national investment policy, energy policy, telecommunication, economic growth and poverty reduction.

At the time of this interview, Anthony Howlett-Bolton was a strategic justice and security sector adviser, having retired four years earlier as a deputy chief constable for a police force in the United Kingdom.  He worked with the Lesotho Mounted Police, the (Lesotho) National Police Information Agency, Ministry of Home Affairs and Public Safety, and the British Council in Lesotho.  In 2007 Howlett-Bolton began work in Sierra Leone as an adviser to a development program, working with the police, prisons and the Ministry of Home Affairs.

Gareth Newham studied organizational psychology and political studies at the University of Cape Town. He completed a post-graduate degree in political studies and wrote his honors dissertation on civil-military relations and how South Africa could ensure democratic control of the military. In 2002, he received a master’s degree from the Graduate School for Public and Development Management at Wits University. His master’s dissertation looked at how to promote police integrity at Hillbrow Police Station, a corrupt inner-city station. Newham previously worked for the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA) where he led the Provincial Parliamentary Monitoring Project and conducted research on provincial legislatures. He later served as project manager for the Center for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) where he focused on police management issues and crime prevention. In March 2006, Newham became the policy and strategy adviser to the Gauteng MEC (Member of the Executive Cabinet) for Community Safety, a post he continued to hold at the time of this interview.       

At the time of this interview, Chirashree Das Gupta was associate professor at the Centre for Economic Policy and Public Finance of the Asian Development Research Institute, in Patna, the capital of Bihar state, India. She worked on the political economy of state-society relations.

Martin Schönteich began his professional career in 1994 working as a public prosecutor in Durban, South Africa.  At that time he also volunteered to become a police reservist. In addition to working as a public prosecutor, he has worked in the Crime and Justice Policy Unit of the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), a South Africa-based nongovernmental organization that looks at issues of human security in Africa. Before joining the ISS, Schönteich was a public prosecutor with South Africa’s Department of Justice. At the time of this interview, he was a senior legal officer with the Open Society Justice Initiative, an operational program of the Open Society Institute. 

At the time of this interview, Andrew Hughes had over 30 years of experience as a police officer, including as a deputy chief police officer in the Australian Capital Territory Police and assistant commissioner in charge of operations for the Australian Federal Police. He served as a liaison officer at the Australian High Commission in London, working with U.K. and European counterparts primarily on issues related to organized crime. Hughes also spent over three years as the commissioner of police in Fiji, prior to the December 2006 coup. On August 9, 2007, United Nations Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon announced Hughes' appointment as police adviser to the U.N., a role that placed him at the head of U.N. Police peacekeeping operations.