Alpa Shah is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research focuses on social inequality and efforts to address it and she has commented on indigeneity, environmentalism, migration, development, corruption, democracy, citizenship and the state. She is co-editor (with Tobias Kelly) of A Double Edged Sword: Protection and State Violence (2006) and author of In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism and Insurgency, Jharkhand (2010).

Judith Pettigrew is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education and Health Sciences at the University of Limerick, Ireland. She has conducted long-term anthropological research in Nepal since 1990 and has published widely on Nepal's Maoist movement. Her research on the everyday impacts of violence on rural people examines the interrelationships between space, emotional life, violence and psychosocial wellbeing. Her forthcoming monograph is titled, Ethnography and Everyday Life in Nepal's Civil War.