Zbigniew Bujak was born 29 November 1954, in Lopuszno, Poland. He was a labor organizer and Solidarity activist in the 1970s and 1980s. He contributed to and distributed the then illegal Solidarity publications and other underground literature and organized a variety of strikes and civil resistance actions. He was involved in the leadership of the Solidarity movement and participated in the Round Table Agreements alongside Lech Walesa, Adam Michnik and other opposition leaders. In 1986 he received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Human Rights. Bujak was twice elected to the Polish Parliament in the 1990s and served as chief of the Main Tariffs Office in the government of Jerzy Buzek from 1999 to 2001. In 2011 he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta. The Orange Revolution was a series of peaceful protests against government corruption that took place in Ukraine between November 2004 and January 2005 in response to a contested presidential election between Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovich. The opposition accused the authorities of rigging the election in favor of Yanukovich as well as other corrupt practices. The result of the two-month long civil resistance campaign was the annulment of the original election results and a re-vote, in which Yushchenko emerged as the clear winner. The protests ended with Yushchenko's inauguration on 23 January 2005.

Rebun Kayo is a researcher at Hiroshima University, in Hiroshima, Japan, and has served as a volunteer worker for several natural disaster relief programs in Japan. On 20 August 2014, a massive rainstorm hit Hiroshima City, Japan, and triggered a series of landslides that hit residential areas and resulted in the death of 74 people. In fall of 2014, Kayo served as an assistant to Makoto Yokofujita, a visiting scholar of the Carolina Asia Center at UNC-Chapel Hill.