List of Contributors

Barbara Oomen holds a chair in the Sociology ofHuman Rights at Utrecht University, and teaches at University College Roosevelt in Middelburg. Her PhD research, on traditional authorities in South Africa, was supervised by professor Jan Michiel Otto.

Adriaan Bedner is a professor of Law and Society in Indonesia at the Van Vollenhoven Institute (Leiden University). He wrote his PhD about administrative courts in Indonesia under the supervision of Jan Michiel Otto and has continued to collaborate with the latter for almost 20 years on numerous PhD-projects, the INSELA-project on environmental law in Indonesia, the INDIRA-project on land law issues, socio-legal teaching projects in Indonesia, and many other things. Adriaan is currently leading several research projects, most notably one on family law in Indonesia and one on the Indonesian Ombudsman (sponsored by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs through the International Development Law Organization).

John McCarthy is Associate Professor at the ANU Crawford School, and coordinator of the Masters of Environment and Development. He works on questions of governance, institutions and rural development with a focus on forestry, agriculture, food security, and land use. He was previously a Research Fellow at the Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University, Western Australia, and Leiden University in the Netherlands. He has carried out various assignments with agencies, including AusAID (now DFAT), the World Bank, and the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).

Kathryn Robinson is emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Australian National University. Her work focuses on a broad variety of topics, including local practices of Indonesian Islam; Islamic organisations and networks; Southeast Asian women (particularly Indonesia) encompassing labour and marriage, migration, adolescence, sexuality, and reproduction, Islam and women's rights, as well as local level development, and development assistance—in particular mining and water supply. She has published widely on these topics and received numerous awards for her work.

Ahmad Dhiaulhaq is currently a PhD Student at Australian National University. Ahmad is writing a PhD on land conflict resolution in Indonesia's oil palm and industrial forestry plantations. He has published several articles and book chapters on related topics, both in English and Indonesian.

Gerard Persoon is emeritus Professor of Environment and Development and former scientific director of the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (Leiden University). He wrote his PhD about national policies towards indigenous peoples in Indonesia and their impact in the field. He has worked in various research and education programmes concerning indigenous peoples and the human impact of biodiversity conservation in Asian and African countries. He is also a member of the Dutch Timber Procurement Assessment Committee (TPAC).

Tessa Minter is Assistant Professor of Environmental Anthropology at Leiden University, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia and Melanesia. She studies the position of rural communities in natural resource management, especially in relation to extractive industries. She is interested in legal and informal mechanisms for local participation in decision-making and benefit sharing and in the equity aspects of these mechanisms.

Andrew Harding specialises in comparative constitutional law and law and development. With Professor Jan Michiel Otto he edited the London- Leiden Series on Law, Governance and Development, with Kluwer Law International, which preceded the present series with Leiden University Press.

Keebet von Benda-Beckmann is emeritus Professor at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and an associate at the Department of Law and Anthropology at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. From 1979-1982, she worked at the NORZOAC—the predecessor of the Van Vollenhoven Institute (Leiden University). She conducted research on dispute resolution in West Sumatra, local forms of social security in Ambon, emancipation of Moluccan women in the Netherlands, and water law in India and Nepal. From 1999 till 2009, she studied how the Indonesian decentralisation processes changed the relationship among state law, religious law, and adat in West Sumatra. She is currently working on the anthropological background of global legal pluralism, tracing how insights in legal pluralism have developed over the past century in dialogue with the social theories of the time.

Jianfu Chen is Professor of Law, School of Law, La Trobe University, Australia. Professor Chen is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law (FAAL), as well as the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA). He started his long and fruitful academic collaboration with Professor Jan Michiel Otto in 1997 and their friendship has since stood the test of time and distance. Professor Chen specialises in international and comparative law, international human rights law, and Chinese law.

Rikardo Simarmata currently teaches Agrarian Law, Adat Law, and Sociology of Law at the Faculty of Law of Gadjah Mada University.

Carolien Jacobs is Assistant Professor at the Van Vollenhoven Institute (Leiden University). Her PhD-research looked at disputing processes at the local level in Mozambique. She then worked for some years at Wageningen University on various projects. In 2014, she joined the VVI, where she works on issues related to law, governance and development in Africa, especially in the east of Congo. She is particularly interested in questions around access to justice, for which she finds great inspiration in the work carried out by Jan Michiel Otto.

Janine Ubink holds a chair in Law, Governance and Development at the Van Vollenhoven Institute (Leiden University). She has also taught at the Law Schools of University of California, Irvine (UCI), New York University (NYU), and Australia National University, and at the Lim a Po Institute of Social Studies in Suriname. Her PhD-research about customary land management in Ghana was supervised by professor Otto. Janine's research focuses on legal pluralism, traditional authorities, land management, gender, transitional justice, and rule of law reforms, with a focus on Ghana, Namibia, Malawi, Somalia, and South Africa. Janine is the President of the International Commission on Legal Pluralism.

Suliman Ibrahim is Assistant Professor of Law at Benghazi University, and Director of the Benghazi Centre for Law and Society Studies. He is also a senior researcher at the Van Vollenhoven Institute (Leiden University). He holds a PhD in law from Lancaster University. Since 2012, he has worked with Professor Jan Michiel Otto on research projects in Libya: Access to Justice, Assessing Legislation for Libya's Reconstruction, Solving Real Property Conflicts, and the Role of Law in National Reconciliation.

Nick Huls is emeritus Professor of Socio-Legal Studies at the Erasmus Law School and Leiden University. He is also a honorary professor at the law faculty of the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He has known Jan Michiel Otto since 1987 from the time when Nick was a mentor at The Dutch Council for Legal Cooperation with Indonesia. Nick worked and lived in Nyanza, Rwanda, from 2011-2013, where he was the Vice-Rector for Academic Affairs and Research at the Institute for Legal Practice and Development. As a senior research fellow at the Van Vollenhoven Institute, he coordinates a PhD-programme with the law faculty of the University of Rwanda.

Sulistyowati Irianto is Professor of Legal Anthropology at the Faculty of Law, Universitas Indonesia. During her academic career, she came across the field of socio-legal studies. It was Professor Jan Michiel Otto (together with Adriaan Bedner) who introduced Indonesian legal scholars to socio-legal studies through certain courses, in which she was involved as a member of the steering committee. Today, socio-legal studies in Indonesia involve many lecturers at law faculties throughout the country. Professor Irianto did post-doctoral research on inheritance rights among Indonesian Muslim women at the Van Vollenhoven Institute, sponsored by the KNAW-SPIN Programme.