Berkley Center

Ian Bannon is currently Country Director for Sudan at the World Bank. Prior to this, he was Sector Manager of the Post Conflict and Social Development Unit in the Africa Region of the World Bank and manager of the Conflict Prevention and Reconstruction Unit. He is an economist with an extensive career in the World Bank, having worked in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and South Asia. He has researched and written on gender, education, private investment, child health, natural resources, mental health and the links between conflict and development. His publications include Natural Resources and Violent Conflict: Options and Actions (co-edited with Paul Collier, World Bank 2003), Gender, Conflict, and Development (co-written with Tsjeard Bouta and Georg Frerks, World Bank 2005), and The Other Half of Gender: Men’s Issues in Development (co-edited with Maria C. Correia, World Bank 2006).

Jok Madut Jok is an undersecretary in South Sudan's Ministry of Culture and Heritage, as well as a professor of African studies in the department of History at Loyola Marymount University in California and executive director of the Sudd Institute. He previously has been a senior fellow at the United States Institute for Peace and a fellow of the Rift Valley Institute. Jok was born and raised in Sudan and studied in Egypt and the United States. He has worked in aid and development, first as a humanitarian aid worker and subsequently as a consultant for various aid agencies. He has previously received a USIP grant and a Woodrow Wilson Center Fellowship, where he presented ideas to policymakers and conducted consultancies on post-war reconstruction and violence against women, all emphasizing peace building. He is trained in anthropology of health and has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Katherine Marshall, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, leads the center’s work on religion and global development. She is also a professor of the practice of development, conflict, and religion in the Walsh School of Foreign Service, teaching diverse courses on the ethics of development work and mentoring students at many levels. She helped to create and now serves as the executive director of the World Faiths Development Dialogue, an NGO that works to enhance bridges between different sectors and institutions. In September 2022, she was appointed as a member of the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Marshall has five decades of experience on a variety of development issues in Africa, Latin America, East Asia, and the Middle East, particularly those facing the world’s poorest countries; one way she shares her expertise is through her blog Faith in Action. She was a World Bank officer from 1971 to 2006, and she led the World Bank’s faith and ethics initiative between 2000 and 2006. Marshall is a member of the Working Group on Child Rights and Family Values and the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, both part of the Culture of Encounter Project.