Speakers
Moderator and Speaker: Bikrum Singh Gill is a scholar of International Political Economy. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech, where he is also core faculty in the ASPECT doctoral program. His research is generally centered on the global intersections of political economy, race, and ecology, and he explores these themes more specifically as they bear upon issues of agriculture and development, the climate crisis, and decolonization. He has long been involved in anti-war and anti-imperialist campaigns, and has most recently joined the International People’s Tribunal on US imperialism as a special rapporteur.
Matteo Capasso is Marie Curie Global Fellow between Columbia University, USA and University of Venice, Italy. He is the author of Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (2023, Syracuse UP) that reconstructs the last two decades of the country’s politics, leading up to the NATO-led regime change operation in 2011 that sanctioned its fall. His current research focuses on the impact of US-led imperialist policies, and the political economy of war, sanctions, and militarism. He is editor of the academic journal, Middle East Critique, and his work has appeared in several academic outlets, including Review of International Political Economy, World Review of Political Economy, Politics, Review of African Political Economy, Journal of Labor and Society, among many others. He is a Special Rapporteur of the International People’s Tribunal on US Imperialism: Sanctions, Blockades, and Economic Coercive Measures.
Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC). He is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and contributing columnist for Counterpunch. He was recently awarded the US Peace Memorial 2019 Peace Prize and the Serena Shim award for uncompromised integrity in journalism.
Max Ajl is a Senior Fellow at the University of Ghent, an associated researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment and a postdoctoral fellow with the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University. He is the author of A People’s Green New Deal (2021). He has written for Monthly Review, Jacobin and Viewpoint. He has contributed to the Journal of Peasant Studies, Review of African Political Economy and Globalizations, and is an associate editor at Agrarian South & Journal of Labor and Society.
Bana Abu Zuluf is a Palestinian PhD candidate in International Law at Maynooth University Ireland and a member of the Good Shepherd Collective.
Louis Allday is a writer and historian. He has a PhD in History. He is the founding editor of Liberated Texts, a book reviewing and publishing project dedicated to reviewing and (re)publishing works that have been neglected, overlooked or suppressed in the mainstream since their publication. In his capacity as a member of the editorial board of Ebb Magazine, he recently edited a special issue of the magazine dedicated to Palestine, released on January 10th 2024.
Kilani is a Palestinian-American researcher, PhD student, and member of the Good Shepherd Collective.
