Michael Levien is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, USA. He is the author of Dispossession without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India (2018).

Michael Watts is Class of 63 Emeritus Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of California Berkeley, USA.

Yan Hairong teaches in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She is the author of New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China (2008), and co-author of The Chinese are the Worst?: Human Rights and Labor Practices in Zambian Mining (2012) and China in Africa: Discourses and Practices (in Chinese, 2017).