Philip Marfleet is Reader in Social Sciences at the University of East London. He has published widely in the fields of globalisation and migration, Middle East Studies, religious activism and cultures of exile. He has worked in as a journalist in the Middle East and North Africa, for international human rights organisations, and in universities in Britain and the Middle East. He is author of Refugees in a Global Era (2006). Rabab El-Mahdi is Assistant Professor of Political Science at The American University in Cairo. She has worked at McGill University in Canada and for the Canadian International Development Agency. She has written on movements of protest in Egypt, on the Egyptian women»s movement, and on modern Egyptian history. She is the author of Egypt»s Feminist Movement: Different or Non-Existent? (2007).