John Walton holds a joint appointment in the Departments of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. He is author of Reluctant Rebels: Comparative Studies of Revolution and Underdevelopment (1984) and most recently Western Times and Water Wars: State, Culture, and Rebellion in California (1992).

David Seddon is Professor of Development Studies at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, and has written extensively on "the politics of structural adjustment".