Advisory Group

A. Heather Coyne is working as a special advisor on security issue at US Army.

Abda Khalid contributed to ICT4COP’s Work Package 8: South Asia, as a member of the research team at COMSATS Abbottabad, with a focus on exploring gender-based violence and community policing in post-conflict areas in Northern Pakistan.
Dr. Abda Khalid earned her doctorate from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) in International Environmental and Development Studies. Apart from serving as full-time Assistant Professor in the Department of Development Studies, she is also affiliated with NMBU, Norway as an external examiner. As Lead Investigator in an ICIMOD-funded research project on sustainable water management in the Himalayas, Dr. Abda is also developing a baseline survey for a policy brief on climate change and internal migration funded by the Islamic Relief Fund (IRF). She is also working with ICIMOD as their core team member in the Western Himalayan region. She has been engaged in many international projects, like “Human Security and Gender in Post-Conflict Swat”, funded by NORHED, and “Community-Based Policing and Post-Conflict Police Reforms”, funded by the EU (Horizon 2020). As an expert in qualitative research, Dr. Abda frequently publishes in national and international journals.
I am an MSCA post-doctoral researcher placed in the Centre of community policing and post conflict reforms in NMBU. I joined the Centre in August 2023. Before joining the Centre as a post-doctoral researcher, I was working as a full-time Assistant professor in COMSATS University, Islamabad in the department of Development Studies. I started my career as an academician in 2016 after completing my PhD from the Department of International Environment and Development Studies. While working in Pakistan,
I taught a wide range of courses at undergraduate and graduate level like Gender and Development, Rural Institution and Social change, Social, Political and Economic Dimensions of Development, Peace Studies, Conflict, Peace and Development. I have Supervised 20 undergraduate students, 10 graduate and Co-supervised 1 PhD student during my 6 years of work at COMSATS. I worked in many campus level committees from admission and outreach committee to campus discipline Committee. I have been actively involved in research projects. I have led two international projects funded by ICIMOD on water resource management and worked as team member (Gender expert) in ICT4COP-Horizon 2020, Gender, Human security and policy Implication in Post Conflict Swat and Determining Socio economic condition of Afghan Refugees. I have been very actively involved in community development work. I have been working with Hazara police in awareness sessions on child abuse and women rights, I have conducted series of lectures on women, leadership and women rights in government community colleges, I have been very actively involved in arranging seminars on workplace harassment in university both for students and faculty members. I have been very actively engaged in publishing papers. My publications are diverse, and I have 11 impact factor publications.
About the Project

My post doc research titling , " "Exploring Complex Realities Around Gender Based Violence, Multiple Legal Orders and Role of Police in Addressing GBV Cases in Pakistan and Pakistani Immigrant Community in Norway" aims to map the complex realities, multiple legal orders and role of police in addressing GBV cases in Pakistan and in the Pakistani immigrant community in Norway. The study will unveil mechanisms that can effectively and efficiently help in preventing GBV cases. In my project, I am exploring how legal pluralities and legal plural orders rival in complex societies with respect to GBV and threatens or strengthens human security of men and women in their daily lives. Also, how community policing focuses on the development of a collaborative partnership between community and the police to proactively address the root-causes of gender-based crimes. I will work with Dr. Shai Divon as my mentor and Professor Dr. Ingrid Nyborg as an Ethics mentor during the two year research project.

Alice Hills led ICT4COP’s Work Package 7: Africa from 2015-2020. Her personal research focused on developments in Somalia and Somaliland.
Professor Alice Hills is a professor at the universities of Durham and Leeds, where her research on police development in Somalia is funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Before joining Durham as its professor of conflict studies, 2013-2017, she was professor of conflict and security at the University of Leeds. Prior to that she taught defence studies at the UK’s Joint Services Command and Staff College.

Arturo Matute has contributed to ICT4COP’s Work Package 9: Central America through coordinated research in two very different municipalities of Guatemala: In highland, indigenous, strongly-organized Totonicapán, and in urban, disorderly, high-violence Villa Canales. Matute has used the data gathered through qualitative methods in workshops with experts, and in in-depth interviews with active and former security-sector authorities. The research has examined if community-oriented policing strategies open opportunities to forward police reform in the high-violence, low-trust, weak-institutions, post-conflict context of Guatemala.
Arturo Matute is an associated researcher of the Faculty of Social Sciences of Del Valle University of Guatemala. He has led violence prevention programmes based on the production of socioeconomic opportunities in the Central American region for international development agencies, has produced specialised information on citizen security through victimisation surveys and qualitative social research, and has worked as analyst for the International Crisis Group. He holds a master’s degree in anthropology and development from the London School of Economics.

Mr. Babar Bashir has done his Masters in Sociology from the University of Punjab, Lahore - Pakistan. He has served in different Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) at varied positions during 23 years of his professional career. Currently he is the Managing Director at Rozan (www.rozan.org), a women and child rights organization based in Islamabad. His core areas of interest and expertise are, police training and research on gender, inclusion and human rights issues. He has conducted trainings with master trainers of police across the country. Institutionalization of curriculum on gender and violence against women and children’s issues into regular police training in Pakistan is a milestone achievement of his professional career. He is a certified trainer from Training for Change (TFC) Philadelphia, United States of America, with a focus on behavior change communication. He is a Senior Fellow of Synergos, an international network of Civil Society leaders. He is a core group member of Asia Network on Gender Equality. He is a volunteer member of International Police Expert Network (PEN). He has presented his work with police in Nepal, Bangladesh, India, Sweden, Netherlands, Norway, Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, South Africa. USA, Brazil, Mexico, and Canada.

Bahadar Nawab Khattak contributed to WP 8 as team leader for the research conducted in Pakistan. His research focus has been on reform processes in the police, with a particular emphasis on how the police link to local institutions. Nawab has interdisciplinary academic background majoring in Environment and Development Studies. His core areas of specialization are in post crises development, community-based policing, conflict, peace and development, institutions and policy analysis, institutional bricolage, livelihoods and human security, climate change adaptation water supply and sanitation leading to sustainable development.

Dr. Nawab has worked for nearly 30 years promoting Environment and Development Studies through research, education and capacity building. He is a Professor and Chairman of the Department of Development Studies at COMSATS University Islamabad (CUI) Abbottabad Campus, and a Steering Committee Member of the Himalayan University Consortium at ICIMOD (more than 60 universities from Asia, Europe, North America and Australia) since 2013. He has established effective long-term collaborations with the Norwegian and German institutions in the North and Nepalese, Sri Lankan and Chinese institutions in the South. During 2007-2014, Nawab was key in promoting water supply, sustainable sanitation, health and development in Pakistan and Nepal through research and education. In addition to this, during 2011-2014, Nawab also focused on livelihoods, human security, gender and development in the Swat valley through Norwegian funded grants. These studies led to research and educational capacity building programs in Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka on Conflict, Peace and Development during 2015-2020 through a Norwegian funded NORHED program. Studies of social vulnerability and adaptation to climate change in Pakistan was another joint research initiative of Nawab with Norwegian and other partner institutions from Europe during 2013-2016. From 2015 onward, Nawab lead the Pakistani research team in the Pakistan Case country in Work Package 8 in the Horizon 2020 project on community-based policing and post conflict police reforms. Since 2007, Nawab worked jointly on research and capacity building grants with European and Asian universities and research organizations in South Asia, Europe and Africa.

Douglas Brand (PhD) is working as an International Police Advisor, Police Officer (Ret) at University of Oxford.

Erika Rojas contributed to ICT4COP’s Work Package 6: Gender and Work Package 9: Central America. As a member of these groups, she has participated in meetings and discussions, presented a paper at the ICT4COP panel at ISA 2018 in San Francisco, published an article about COP and gender in El Salvador, and collaborated in the writing of other articles.

Erika Rojas has PhD in gender and (feminist) critical security studies in El Salvador, with a background in Political Science and Cultural Studies and an M.A. in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Innsbruck, Austria where she researched narratives and conflict transformation in Colombia. Prior to graduate studies, she worked in Colombia in education and health-related projects financed by the state, and as a consultant for the GIZ in the CERCAPAZ project for peacebuilding initiatives developed through public-private partnership. Currently she is writing a doctoral dissertation with the working title: “Narratives of in/security from the margins. A study of everyday gendered experiences and practices of insecurity in El Salvador”.

Professor Hugo Frühling
Hugo Frühling contributed to ICT4COP´s Work Package 9: Central America by preparing desk-based studies on Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. He coauthored some of the articles prepared for this study and collaborated in the preparation of a literatura review on trust, legitimacy and pólice accountability.

Hugo Frühling was born in Santiago, Chile. He has a JD. From the University of Chile, an LLM and an S.J.D from Harvard Law School. He is currently full profesor at the Faculty of Government of the University of Chile and was Director of the Institute of Public Affairs of the University of Chile from 2014 to 2022.

He has published on public policies on crime, police reform, human rights and judicial reform in Latin America. He has been visiting profesor at Ottawa Law School, Harvard Law School, Princeton University and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars. Some of his publications are:

Frühling, H. & Corvalán, M.V. (2017) “Pacificação de bairros vulneráveis: o caso do Barrio en Paz Residencial, no Chile” em Moreira, A; Barreto, A.;Chirio, M.; Mores L. (Editores) Pacificação: o que é e a quem se destina. Rio do Janeiro: Editora Alameda. Violence and Police in Latin America, published by FLACSO Ecuador in 2009. “A realistic look at Latin American community policing programmes, Policing and Society, 22:1, 76-88, 2012; Políticas públicas en materia de seguridad ciudadana durante el gobierno de Sebastián Piñera (2010 – 2011)”. Política. Revista de Ciencia Política, volumen 49 No, 2. 2011, pgs. 113 – 126.

Janina Czapska contributed to ICT4COP’s Work Package 10: South Eastern Europe as the leader of the Polish research team.

Dr. hab. Janina Czapska, professor of the Jagiellonian University. In her publications and research, she deals mostly with issues from between social psychology and legal sciences, criminal law application and security. Her works from the recent years have focused on issues such as the police’s accountability, citizens’ sense of security, the conflict between security and freedom from the criminal and political perspective and mediation. The author of the monograph Citizens’ security. A study from the field of legal policy. She is the head of the Department of Sociology of Law at the Faculty of Law and Administration of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She is the co-author of the municipal programme of threat prevention Safe Kraków and the president of its programme board. She has previously participated in Polish and international research programmes on various aspects of a legal policy; in some of them, she was the head of the grant (in Polish projects) or the head of the Polish work package (in international projects). In the ICT4COP project, she leads the Polish research team within the WP10: Regional Focus South-Eastern Europe that is led by the Ruhr-University in Bochum.

Kari Osland contributed to ICT4COP’s Work Package 2: Comparative COP, through strategic discussions on project methodology, as an observer on the Steering Committee, and through participating in the General Assembly on behalf of NUPI. She facilitated collaboration between work packages to ensure coherence and interdisciplinarity, contributed to the creation of deliverables that analyze complex and interdisciplinary findings such as the e-learning handbooks and use of digital stories, and was involved in the planning and implementation of annual meetings.

Kari Margrethe Osland (PhD) is a Director and Senior Researcher at NUPI, where she has been heading the Peace, Conflict and Development Research Group for the past seven years. Osland focuses predominantly on conflict dynamics, insurgencies, peace operations and peace building. She wrote her PhD on international assistance to police reform in post-conflict countries, comparing Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Serbia and South Sudan. She has done consultancy work for the UN, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and for the Norwegian Police Directorate, in particular on international policing and Security Sector Reform. She has field work experience from the Balkans (30+), Afghanistan (2) and a number of African countries (Niger, South Sudan, Sudan).

Katarzyna Struzińska contributed to ICT4COP’s Work Package 6: Gender Issues, and Work Package 10: South Eastern Europe as the researcher responsible for case country Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Katarzyna Struzińska is a research associate and a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Sociology of Law at the Faculty of Law and Administration of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Her main research interests revolve around police sciences, sociology of law, gender and security studies. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Russian Studies and three Master’s degrees in Law, Russian Studies (focus area: the culture of Russia and neighbouring nations) and Linguistics (languages: English and Russian) from the Jagiellonian University. In October 2011, she was granted the first award by the Polish Academy of Sciences and Foundation Gender Center in the competition for the best thesis about gender for her Master’s Thesis in Law – The situation of victims of rape in Poland. Stereotypes about raped persons, their rights and possible ways of supporting them. Katarzyna has also completed postgraduate studies in Gender Mainstreaming at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She works for the ICT4COP project since its beginning; she is a member of WP10: Regional Focus South-Eastern Europe, as a researcher responsible for case country Bosnia and Herzegovina, and WP6: Gender Issues.

Shai André Divon contributed to ICT4COP’s Work Package 7: Africa, and was responsible for the Northern Uganda component of the WP. His research focused on investigating the application of the Ugandan COP model in theory and practice in the Gulu municipality, and on street youth and criminal gangs in Gulu City. Divon also contributed to WP2: Comparative COP, where he helped develop a conceptual map for the analysis of police reform and power in post conflict societies.

Dr. Shai André Divon is the former head of the Department of International Environment and Development Studies (Noragric), and an Associate Professor in Democracy, Participation and Global Studies at Noragric. Divon is an interdisciplinary scholar who works on the intersection between global development, security, and the environment. His work and research experience spans over four continents, including research in several African and Asian countries, the Middle East and North America. Before his contribution to the EU Horizon2020 project ICT4COP, Divon was part of the GENTRA project financed by the Norwegian Research Council, led by the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs (NUPI) where he studied Gender Based Violence and Legal Pluralism in Liberia. He is the co-author of the book 'United States Assistance Policy in Africa: Exceptional Power', where he explored the development assistance policy of the United States in Africa since the end of WWII. His current work focuses on Biodiversity conservation in multi-use landscapes in India. In 2016 Divon was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, and was hosted by the School of International Service (SIS) in Washington DC.

Stian Lid led ICT4COP’s Work Package 7: Africa from mid-2020 through the project’s end, organizing the work packages regional workshop. He has contributed to the project through his research on COP policies in transitional countries, and the dynamics between youth groups, community-based organizations and local police in Mathare.

Stian Lid’s research is concentrated on Kenya, and is twofold: He has analyzed what is decisive for the formation of community-oriented policing policies in transitional countries. In addition, he has investigated the various relationship and dynamics between youth groups, community-based organizations (CBOs) and local police in Mathare, an informal settlement in Nairobi. Lid has a background from criminology and has experience from research in both Africa and Europe. Lid is working as a senior researcher at OsloMet.

Tor Damkås led ICT4COP’s Work Package 4: Police Training and Education from 2015 – 2017, overseeing a number of the work package’s deliverables. He was active during the project application phase and was responsible for establishing and running the Police Experts Network (PEN).

Tor Damkaas; retired Police Superintendent at Norwegian Police University College, Oslo, Post Graduate Studies, responsible for International Civil Circes Management Training: During his 45 years long career he mostly served in different rural areas on community oriented policing. Tor Damkaas is working current as an International Police Advisor and he conducted several international police reform missions, first in Bosnia and Herzegovina as a UN Police Officer in 1997-98. Next mission was in Sierra Leone in 2002 serving as “Election Expert Police Adviser”. Tor served twice in Afghanistan, 2005-06; Instructor and Police Advisor under a bi-lateral Norwegian-Afghan project. In 2007 Tor was deployed to Ache province in Indonesia on a Norwegian – Indonesia bi-lateral police advising project on Human Rights. Tor was back in Afghanistan 2011-12 as a UNPOL Advisor for UNAMA where he was a member of different working groups involved with the Ministry of Interior’s work on re-organizing Afghan National Police. In 2012 he co-edited a “White Paper” on Afghan National Police. In 2015 till late 2016 Tor was part time deployed as police representative from Ministry of Justice and Security in Norway to a bilateral mission of Legal Experts to Ukraine. Tor has also participated as a police member to the annual governmental “Norwegian-Indonesia Human Rights Dialogue” delegation three times 2009 -2010 and 2011. Tor Damkaas is a qualified trainer for both the UN Police Officers Course and the UN Gender and Sexual Based Violence course. Tor has conducted several pre-deployment courses (UNPOC) in Norway and abroad. He has also been guest speaker at the NATO School in Oberammergau, Germany. From 2013 till today Tor is a member of the international Management Team responsible for the annual “Senior Strategic Police Advisors Masterclass on Security Sector Reform” conducted at different locations and planned for Germany Police University 2021.

I have wide experience with International Research and Research Projects from NMBU and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I have coordinated research, reporting and communication with various financiers. Over the last five years as administrative Coordinator for the research- and innovation project ICT4COP and previously as Senior Advisor for Development Coordination at the Norwegian Embassy in Nicaragua. I have good knowledge of international research in collaboration with the European Commission and the EU system, as well as in Norwegian public- and civil society organisations.

My main fields of knowledge and experience are international cooperation and research administration, research ethics, data management, coordination and cooperation with public, private, and civil society institutions, planning and implementation of international events, process management, and the different institutional rules and regulations for international research collaboration.

Staff Officer to National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) Head of Strategic Hub

Mark is a serving police officer with 29 years’ experience having worked in CT, SOC, Financial crime, Intelligence, Training, Community Policing and Public Order. In 2016 he was seconded to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, and 2020 the Home Office developing the Joint International Policing Hub (JIPH) where he was the Acting and then Deputy Head of Unit, a Strategic Policing Advisor, and International Engagement officer. He is currently the staff officer to the head of the NPCC Strategic Hub.

Between 2017-2021, Mark was at the forefront of the creation and delivery of the Home Office Modern Slavery Team / Vietnamese Peoples Police human trafficking training programme. Mark was part of consortia boards of management for the European Union Police & Civilian Services Training (EUPCST); the International Police Advisors Masterclass (IPAM); and currently sits on the Open University/Centre for Policing Research & Learning Membership & Steering Committees and the International Police Experts Network. In 2019 he was awarded an International Police Association Arthur Troop Scholarship allowing him to study Transnational Child Sexual Exploitation within the Australian Federal Police / ARLEMP - Asian Region Law Enforcement Management Programme. In 2020 he was invited as a past Alumnus to participate in ARLEMP’s Pandemic and Resilience Preparedness programme.
Mark is a founding Director (2023) of the Ethical Support Alliance (Charitable Foundation) where he is a visiting lecturer at the Lviv State University of Internal Affairs (LvSUIA), Ukraine where he initiated an Ethics and Standards English Language programme for police recruits. In 2023, Mark was the author of the International Policing modules for a BSc degree programme for the Royal Cambodian Police Academy.

Mark’s academic background is Leadership & Management, Training, Security, Crisis and Risk Management. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Security & Risk Management, a member of the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) and is currently studying for an MSc in International Policing.