I am pleased to welcome into the fold three new contributors to the DNSI Blog.

First, we will be cross-blogging with ENSAAF, an organization whose mission is to "fight[] impunity for human rights violations committed in India. " ENSAAF is an authority on the human rights abuses carried out during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in India. As DNSI is interested in international and historical contexts in which minority communities are subjected to mistreatment during national crises, DNSI will benefit greatly from ENSAAF's knowledge of the 1984 pograms.

We will cross-post entries by ENSAAF's bloggers, Jaskaran Kaur and Vanessa Pon. According to ENSAAF, Jaskaran:

has authored several seminal reports on human rights abuses in India, including Twenty Years of Impunity: The November 1984 Pogroms of Sikhs in India, and, as a contributing author, Reduced to Ashes: The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab, analyzing over 600 cases of extrajudicial execution and disappearance by Punjab's security forces. From 2003 to 2005, Kaur was the recipient of the Irving R. Kaufman Fellowship from Harvard Law School. In 2001, she went to Punjab on a Harvard Human Rights Summer Fellowship to study the role of the judiciary in handling habeas corpus petitions filed before the Punjab and Haryana High Court by families of the disappeared; her study was published in the Harvard Human Rights Journal. Kaur graduated with distinction from Yale College in 2000 and Harvard Law School in 2003.

And Vanessa is a:

student at UC Berkeley. Her majors are Economics and Political Economy of Industrial Societies. She is currently interning for ENSAAF and works on ENSAAF’s blog and newsletter.

Please also welcome Tracy Wells, a research associate at Harvard's Pluralism Project. Tracy has already been an invaluable resource to the blog. We look forward to her commentary. According to the Pluralism Project:

Tracy works with our Religious Diversity News, searching for articles to include and entering the international articles into the databse. She is also continuing research on interfaith organizations, which began in her first year at the project (2003) with a survey of interfaith groups in Boston, available in the online version of World Religions in Boston. Originally from Lexington, South Carolina, she earned a B.A. in English and religion from Furman University and conducted student affiliate research mapping religious diversity in South Carolina in the summer of 2003. She is currently a third year M.T.S. student at Harvard Divinity School, where she is a participant in the Program in Religion and Secondary Education.

In addition to posts from Jaskaran, Vanessa, and Tracy, the DNSI blog will feature entries from Valarie Kaur, and myself, Dave Sidhu. Valarie's entries will be cross-posts from her journal, "Into the Whirlwind."