Sulle is a Research Advisor at the Aga Khan University, Arusha Campus, Tanzania. He is well-known as a leading scholar on agrarian studies in Africa, a contributor to the Network of Excellence on Land Governance in Africa. He holds a PhD in Land and Agrarian Studies from the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), University of the Western Cape, South Africa and Master’s degree in Public Policy (Environmental Policy) from the School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, United States. Emmanuel has won various awards for his academic excellence including Harvard University Doctoral Student Fellowship and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) Doctoral Grant. 

Prior to joining AKU Emmanuel worked at PLAAS, where he led diverse groups of researchers on numerous complex studies in over seven countries in Eastern, Southern, Central and Western Africa. These include large projects on women’s land rights with field research teams in seven countries and development corridors in four countries. These multi-country and multi-disciplinary research experiences have helped him develop considerable leadership skills in managing research projects in different contexts and diverse groups. 

His current research interests include policy analysis, green economy, land tenure and agrarian transformation in Africa.

Andries du Toit has a PhD in Comparative Studies from the University of Essex. His training is in political theory and discourse analysis. He has done extensive research on the political economy of structural poverty and racialised inequality in a range of contexts in South Africa. His publications include work on the social relations of labour on commercial fruit and wine farms in the Western Cape, on chronic and structural poverty in the rural and urban Western Cape and in the Eastern Cape, and on the dynamics of marginalised livelihoods and informal social protection in the migrant networks of the Eastern and Western Cape.

At present, his work focuses on developing a critical understanding of post-Apartheid biopolitics in the context of de-agrarianisation and large scale economic marginalisation.  His key interest lies in the implications of entrenched poverty and structural inequality for the forms of governmental deliberation, policy knowledge and political community that are possible in the South African political context.  In general, his concern is to understand the implications of the challenges that are posed for policy discourse and governmental reason by the rising tide of ‘populist’ and anti-liberal discourses that have dominated contentious politics internationally since the global financial crisis.  In the South African context, he is interested in understanding how these dynamics play out in the context of popular mobilisation, political theatrics, and technocratic policy discourse around questions of land and political belonging.