The Team

Mona Ali Khalil is a public international lawyer with 30 years of service in the United Nations system including as a Senior Legal Officer in the UN Office of the Legal Counsel where she advised on peacekeeping and peace enforcement including sanctions, counter-terrorism and WMD disarmament. She is the Director of MAK LAW International — a strategic consulting service advising governments and intergovernmental organizations. She is an affiliate of the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict and a non-resident member of the faculty in the Vienna Diplomatic Academy and the Vienna School of International Studies. She has co-authored several publications most recently including Empowering the UN Security Council: Reforms to Address Modern Threats (Oxford University Press (2024)), Reinvigorating the United Nations (Routledge (2024)), the UN Security Council Conflict Management Handbook (AGDA,2023), The Future of Diplomacy After the COVID-19 Pandemic (Routledge (2021)) and Protection of Civilians (Oxford University Press (2016)).

Michael Dumper is is Emeritus Professor in Middle East Politics at University of Exeter, UK. His research is primarily on future options for Palestinian refugees and the city of Jerusalem. He is author of The Future of the Palestinian Refugees: Towards Equity and Peace (2007); editor of Palestinian Refugee Repatriation: Global Perspectives (2006). In addition to his most recent book, Power, Piety and People: Holy Cities in the 21st Century (2020), he is also author of Jerusalem Unbound: Geography, History and the Future of the Holy City (2014), The Politics of Sacred Space: The Old City of Jerusalem and the Middle East Conflict, 1967-2000, (2001) and The Politics of Jerusalem Since 1967 (1997). In both these fields he has advised the EU, the UK and Canadian governments and the UN. More recently he has produced several short studies on the funding of UNRWA including Palestine Refugee Perspectives on Options for Sustainable Financing of UNRWA, Policy Brief No 5. Palestinian Economic policy Research Center (MAS), September 2023 and The future of UNRWA in the face of financial challenges and political pressure. Roundtable Briefing Paper (Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute, August 2020)

A Dutch National, Dr. Lex Takkenberg is Senior Advisor on the Question of Palestine at ARDD and free-lance lecturer at the University of Vienna. From 1989 until 2019, he worked in various field and headquarters positions with UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, most recently at its Amman headquarters as the agency’s first Chief Ethics Officer. He was previously UNRWA’s General Counsel, Director of Operations, and (Deputy) Field Director in Gaza and Syria. Before joining UNRWA, he was the Legal Officer of the Dutch Refugee Council, from 1983 until 1989. A law graduate from the University of Amsterdam, where he also worked as an Academic Assistant from 1987-1989, he obtained a Doctorate in International Law from the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands, in 1997 after having successfully defended his doctoral dissertation entitled The Status of Palestinian Refugees in International Law. Oxford University Press (OUP) published a commercial edition of the dissertation in 1998; an integral Arabic translation was published by the Institute for Palestine Studies in 2003. A new version of the book – co-authored with Francesca Albanese – was published, also with OUP, in 2020.

Kjersti G. Berg is an associate professor of Intercultural Studies at University College NLA, in Norway. She is a historian and Middle East researcher specializing on Palestine, the Palestinian refugee question, and in particular UNRWA, Palestinian refugee camps and international aid. She is the author of Palestine. Facts on the ground (in Norwegian), Scandinavian University Press, 2023; co-editor, with Are John Knudsen: Continental encampment. A Genealogy of Humanitarian Containment in the Middle East and Europe, Berghahn books, 2023. Some examples of peer reviewed articles since 2020 include: Berg “Sheikh Jarrah and Beit Qad: The history of two UNRWA out-of-camp housing schemes”, Journal of Refugee Studies 2025; Berg & Jørgen Jensehaugen “The War on UNRWA since 7. October» (in Norwegian), Babylon – Nordic Journal of Middle East Studies 2025; Berg “Perpetual State Building? Norwegian Aid to Palestinians 1993-2023» (in Norwegian), Internasjonal politikk, Vol. 82, nr. 2. 2024; “Mu’askar and Shu’fat: Retracing the Histories of Two Palestinian Refugee Camps in Jerusalem”, Jerusalem Quarterly, Issue 88; Berg “Unending temporary. United Nations Relief and Works Agency and the Palestinian refugee question” (in Norwegian), Babylon – Nordic Journal of Middle East Studies, 2020. Kjersti is the editor of «Palestine», Store Norske Leksikon (The Norwegian Digital Encyclopedia) and teaches courses on the Question of Palestine; forced migration; and on human rights for social scientists. Kjersti has led and participated in a number of reports on UNRWA commissioned by the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, for example Funding crisis and the way forward (CMI 2022) and Consequences of the Israeli UNRWA Ban (Short version, PRIO 2025), and in reports commissioned by the UN (2024).