Nicholas De Genova is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has previously held the posts of visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, University of Chicago; professor of sociocultural, political and legal anthropology and of comparative ethnic and migration studies at Columbia University and Stanford University; and that of Marie Curie Fellow at the Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations, at Warwick. His publications include Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and "Illegality" in Mexican Chicago (Duke University Press, 2005); and Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship (Routledge, 2003). He is currently completing two books: The Spectacle of Terror: Immigration, Race, and the Homeland Security State; and Crossing the Line: a Memoir of Free Speech during Wartime.

Don Flynn is Director of Migrant Rights Network. He leads MRN’s strategic development and coordinates its policy and project work. He researched and founded MRN after many years experience of working with migrant community organisations through his previous roles as Policy Officer with the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants and as an immigration caseworker in London. He also chairs the UK Race and Equality Network (UKREN) and the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (PICUM). He has written numerous articles and papers on immigration law and policy in the UK, including: “Immigration Controls and Citizenship in the Political Rhetoric of New Labour”, in Zureik and Salter (eds.), Global Surveillance and Policing: Border, Security, Identity (Willan, 2005); and Immigration Under New Labour (IPPR, 2010).

Mogens Hobolth is a PhD student at the LSE's European Institute. His doctoral research focuses on the development and implementation of the EU's border policy, investigating how member states apply common policy in practice, and identifying the factors and dynamics which explain the balance struck between open and closed borders. Prior to joining the LSE’s doctoral programme, he worked at the Courts of Denmark as head of an administration section. He has contributed to numerous conferences and his most recent publications include "European Visa Cooperation: Interest Politics and Regional Imagined Communities", in LSE 'Europe In Question' Series (LEQS 34/2011), for which he won first prize in the LSE doctoral paper competition of 2010. He has also written (with Annalisa Meloni), "Promoting the Free Movement of People between the EU and its Neighbourhood", to be published as an EU4Seas Policy Paper (2011).

Andrew Neal is Lecturer in International Relations at Edinburgh University. Previously, he was a research associate at King's College London for the European Commission FP6 research consortium CHALLENGE (The Changing Landscape of European Liberty and Security; and held research and teaching posts at the universities of Keele and Birmingham before that. His research interests lie at the intersection of international relations theory, political theory and security studies. His most recent publications include a research monograph entitled Exceptionalism and the Politics of Counter-Terrorism: Liberty, Security and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2009), and an edited book (with Michael Dillon) entitled Foucault on Politics, Security and War (Palgrave, 2008 and 2011).

Vicki Squire joined The Open University as an RCUK research fellow in October 2007, after working as an ESRC postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Birmingham. Her research is located at the intersections of migration studies, citizenship studies, and critical security studies and is conducted through the Open University’s Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG), as well as through the Department of Politics and International Studies. Her recent publications include an edited book, The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity (London: Routledge) and a monograph entitled The Exclusionary Politics of Asylum (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan). She is a member of the CASE (Critical Approaches to Security in Europe) collective and is Assistant Editor of the journal Citizenship Studies.

Francesco Luciani has been an official of the European Commission since 1998. After having worked for eight years in its External Service, serving in the Commission's Delegations in Chad and Ukraine, he joined the Migration and Asylum unit of the Directorate General Justice, Freedom and Security in Brussels, in 2005. He is currently a member of the International affairs Unit of the Directorate General Home Affairs, where he is in charge, in particular, of the relations and the cooperation between the EU and the Southern and South-Eastern Mediterranean countries.