Faculty Session Overview

Daniel E. Agbiboa is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His research focuses on the relationships between state and nonstate actors and hybrid security governance in contemporary Africa, especially in the context of armed conflicts and city life. His articles have appeared in leading journals, including Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, The Journal of Modern African Studies, African Affairs, African Studies Review, Current History, and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. He is the recipient of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar Award, and is a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is the author of Mobility, Mobilization, and Counter/Insurgency: The Routes of Terror in an African Context (University of Michigan Press), They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption, and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria (Oxford University Press), Transport, Transgression and Politics in African Cities: The Rhythm of Chaos (Routledge), and People, Predicaments and Potentials in Africa (Langaa RPCIG). His research has prompted invitations to consult for the World Bank, the United States Institute of Peace, the African Union, Transparency International, and the Global Center for Pluralism. He is currently leading a major partnership between Howard University National Resource Center for African Studies and George Mason University’s Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution on a US Department of Education Title VI grant (2019-2022) on “Countering Extreme Violence and Making Durable Peace in Africa.”

Scott Appleby is the Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. From 2014-2024 he served as the founding dean of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs. Appleby is a scholar of global religion who has been a member of Notre Dame’s faculty since 1994. From 2000-2014, he served as the Regan Director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Appleby co-directs Contending Modernities, a major multi-year project to examine the interaction among religious and secular forces in the modern world. Appleby’s research examines the various ways in which religious movements and organizations shape, and are shaped by national, regional and global dynamics of governance, deadly conflict, international relations and economic development. He co-chaired the Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ Task Force on Religion and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy, which released the influential report, “Engaging Religious Communities Abroad: A New Imperative for U.S. Foreign Policy.” From 1988 to 1993 Appleby was co-director of the Fundamentalism Project, an international public policy study conducted by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Appleby is the author or editor of 15 books, including the widely cited volumes of The Fundamentalism Project (co-edited with Martin E. Marty and published by the University of Chicago Press); and The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence and Reconciliation. Most recently, Appleby co-edited (with Atalia Omer) The Oxford Handbook on Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding. He also serves as lead editor of the Oxford University Press series “Studies in Strategic Peacebuilding.” Appleby is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, and the recipient of five honorary doctorates.

Robert Art, the Former Director of MIT's Seminar XXI Program, is Herter Professor of International Relations at Brandeis University and a Senior Fellow in the Security Studies Program at MIT's Center for International Studies. He has served as a Consultant to the Secretary of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency, and is currently a Faculty Associate of the National Intelligence Council. Professor Art's books include The TFX Decision: McNamara and the Military; Reorganizing America's Defense, with Samuel P. Huntington and Vincent Davis, eds.; U.S. Foreign Policy: The Search for a New Role with Seyom Brown, eds.; The United States and Coercive Diplomacy, with Patrick Cronin, eds.; Democracy and Counterterrorism, with Louise Richardson, eds.; A Grand Strategy for America; and America’s Grand Strategy and World Politics.

Eva Bellin is the Myra and Robert Kraft Professor of Arab Politics in the Department of Politics and the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. Bellin is a comparativist whose interests center on issues of democratization and authoritarian persistence, political and economic reform, civil society, religion and politics, and the politics of cultural change. She is the author of Stalled Democracy: Capital, Labor, and the Paradox of State Sponsored Development and co-editor of Building Rule of Law in the Arab World. She has published in a variety of venues including World Politics, Comparative Politics, Political Science Quarterly, Comparative Political Studies, World Development, Foreign Affairs, Middle East Policy, as well as numerous edited books. In 2006-2008 she was named a Carnegie Scholar by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, supporting her research on high courts in the Middle East and Islamic World. She was also named a Fellow at the Princeton Institute for Regional and International Studies, Democracy and Development Program in 2006-2007. Bellin has served on the editorial board of the journal Comparative Politics since 2005. She has conducted field work in Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, and Pakistan.

Joel F. Brenner specializes in cyber and physical security, data protection and privacy, intelligence law, the administration of classified information and facilities, and the regulation of sensitive cross-border transactions. He has represented companies and individuals in a wide variety of transactions and proceedings including sensitive foreign acquisitions involving the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS), the law governing network operations, the liability of foreign governments, export controls, and internal corporate and government investigations. He has years of experience inside and outside government involving national and homeland security. Joel was Senior Counsel at the National Security Agency, advising Agency leadership on the public-private effort to create better security for the Internet. From 2006 until mid-2009, he was the head of U.S. counterintelligence under the Director of National Intelligence and was responsible for integrating the counterintelligence activities of the 17 departments and agencies with intelligence authorities, including the FBI and CIA and elements of the Departments of Defense, Energy, and Homeland Security. From 2002 – 2006, Joel was NSA’s Inspector General, responsible for that agency’s top-secret internal audits and investigations. He has also served as a prosecutor in the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division and has extensive trial and arbitration experience in private practice. In addition to his practice, Joel is a Senior Research Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he divides his time between the Center for International Studies and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. At MIT he works on protecting critical infrastructure networks and on intelligence and security issues. He is particularly interested in intelligence collection, privacy, and secrecy as emerging issues in international relations and in the potential for curbing state-sponsored theft of intellectual property. He is a member of the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Law & National Security. He has written about intelligence oversight and Presidential authority to suspend or prohibit foreign takeovers of U.S. firms, and is often quoted in the national media on data security, privacy, and intelligence issues. Brenner was awarded the Intelligence Community Achievement Medal in July 2009. Brenner is the author of America the Vulnerable: Inside the New Threat Matrix of Digital Espionage, Crime and Warfare (Penguin Press, 2011), now available in paperback as Glass Houses: Privacy, Secrecy, and Cyber Insecurity in a Transparent World (Penguin Press, 2013).

Daniel Byman is a professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and a Senior Fellow and Director of Research at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He served as director of Georgetown's Security Studies Program and Center for Security Studies from 2005 until 2010. He also leads at Georgetown team in teaching a "Massive Open Online Course" (MOOC) on terrorism and counterterrorism for EdX. From 2002 to 2004 he served as a Professional Staff Member with the 9/11 Commission and with the Joint 9/11 Inquiry Staff of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. Before joining the Inquiry Staff he was the Research Director of the Center for Middle East Public Policy at the RAND Corporation. Previous to this, Professor Byman worked as an analyst on the Middle East for the U.S. government. His recent publications include Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the Global Jihadist Movement: What Everyone Needs to Know; A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism; The Five Front War: The Better Way to Fight Global Jihad; Deadly Connections: States that Sponsor Terrorism; and Keeping the Peace: Lasting Solutions to Ethnic Conflict.

Fr. Matthew Carnes, S.J., is an associate professor at Georgetown University in the Department of Government and the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, and he currently serves as the Director of the Center for Latin American Studies. His research examines the dynamics of labor and social welfare policy in developing and middle-income countries. A specialist on Latin America, he has conducted extensive field research in Argentina, Peru, Chile, and Bolivia, and he has worked on development projects in Honduras, Mexico, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Ecuador. He is the author of Continuity Despite Change: The Politics of Labor Regulation in Latin America (Stanford University Press, 2014), and numerous journal articles. A distinguished educator, he has received three of Georgetown University’s highest teaching awards, including Georgetown College's Edward B. Bunn, S.J. Award (2017 and 2011), given by graduating seniors of the College; the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service Faculty of the Year Award (2013), given by the SFS Academic Council; and the University-wide Dorothy Brown Award for Outstanding Teaching Achievement (2011). In 2012, he was featured as one of the country's best professors in the Princeton Review's publication, 300 Best Professors. In recent years, he has been a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame (Spring 2009) and a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University (Academic Year 2011-2012).

Victor Cha is Vice Dean and the D.S. Song-KF Professor in Government and International Affairs at Georgetown University.  He is also a Senior Adviser and inaugural holder of the Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.  He left the White House in 2007 after serving since 2004 as Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council (NSC). At the White House, he was responsible primarily for Japan, the Korean peninsula, Australia/New Zealand and Pacific Island nation affairs. Dr. Cha was also the deputy head of delegation for the United States at the Six-Party Talks in Beijing and received two Outstanding Service commendations during his tenure at the NSC. He is the author of five books, including the award-winning Alignment Despite Antagonism: The United States-Korea-Japan Security Triangle (Stanford University Press) (winner of the 2000 Ohira Book Prize) and The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future (Harper Collins Ecco, 2012), which was selected by Foreign Affairs as a “Best Book on the Asia-Pacific for 2012.” His latest book is Powerplay: Origins of the American Alliance System in Asia (Princeton University Press, 2016). He is also writing a new book on the impact of US-China competition on U.S. alliances around the world. He has published articles on international relations and East Asia in journals including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, International Security, Political Science Quarterly, Survival, International Studies Quarterly, International Journal of the History of Sport, and Asian Survey. Dr. Cha is a former John M. Olin National Security Fellow at Harvard University, two-time Fulbright Scholar, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Scholar at Columbia University, and Hoover National Fellow, CISAC Fellow, and William J. Perry Fellow at Stanford University. He is currently a fellow in Human Freedom (non-resident) at the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas, Texas. He is also a Contributor for NBC News and MSNBC.

Jessica Chen Weiss is the Michael J. Zak Professor for China and Asia-Pacific Studies in the Department of Government at Cornell University. From August 2021 to July 2022, Weiss served as senior advisor to the Secretary's policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State on a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow ship for Tenured IR Scholars (IAF-TIRS) while on sabbatical from Cornell. She studies Chinese politics and foreign relations with an emphasis on nationalism and public opinion, focusing on the connection between domestic politics and international relations. Her first book, Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China's Foreign Relations (Oxford University Press, August 2014), examined how the Chinese Communist Party has managed nationalist, anti-foreign protests, tracing the government's repression and facilitation of grassroots mobilization as a means of conveying reassurance and resolve. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, International Organization, China Quarterly, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Security Studies, Journal of Contemporary China, and the Review of International Political Economy. Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, she received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego.

Richard Clarke is the founder and CEO of Good Harbor Cyber Security Risk Management, and advises leaders in the public and private sectors on all issues of cyber security and crisis management. Clarke served in the White House on the National Security Council under President George H.W. Bush, President Bill Clinton, and President George W. Bush for an unprecedented ten years. As the country’s chief counterterrorism expert, Clarke was tasked with building the National Strategic Stockpile and also led the White House’s response on September 11, 2001. Then, as Special Advisor to the President on Cyber Security, or “Cyber-Czar,” Clarke developed the country’s first National Strategy to Defend Cyberspace. Since leaving government, Clarke has authored or co-authored nine books, including the international bestseller, Against All Enemies, Warnings, and his latest with Robert Knake, The Fifth Domain.

Benjamin J. Cohen is Louis G. Lancaster Professor of International Political Economy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he has been a member of the Political Science Department since 1991. He previously taught at Princeton University from 1964-1971 and at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University from 1971-1991. His publications have addressed issues of international monetary relations, U.S. foreign economic policy, European monetary integration, developing country debt, and theories of economic imperialism. His most recent publications include The Future of Global Currency: The Euro versus the Dollar; "Toward a New Consensus: From Denial to Acceptance," in Nicola Phillips and Catherine Weaver, eds., International Political Economy: Debating the Past, Present and Future; and "Are IPE Journals Becoming Boring?" in International Studies Quarterly 54:3. He has won numerous awards and in 2000 was named Distinguished Scholar of the year by the International Political Economy Section of the International Studies Association.

Dr. Nancy Connell is a Senior Scientist in the Board on Life Sciences, Division of Earth and Life Sciences, at the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). Trained in microbial geneticist at Harvard, Dr. Connell’s work focuses on advances in life sciences and technology and their application to a number of developments in the areas of biosecurity, biosafety, and biodefense. Her research analyzes novel biotechnologies that impact the implementation of Biological Weapons Convention and the development of global catastrophic biological risks in ecosystems. She has had a long-standing interest in the development of regulatory policies associated with biocontainment work and dual-use research of concern. Dr. Connell is a past member of the Board on Life Sciences, a current member of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control, and a National Associate of NASEM, where she has served on more than 15 NASEM committees. She also served on the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response Biological Agent Containment Working Group. In addition to life sciences research policy, Dr. Connell has considerable experience and interest in pedagogy, with a focus on ethics education and the responsible conduct of research. She has presented at workshops and meetings around the world on the interrelated issues of biocontainment, infectious disease research, research ethics, and the impact of advancing science and technology on the implementation of the Biological Weapons Convention. Dr Connell was Senior Scientist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and a Professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health from 2018-2021. From 1992-2018, Dr. Connell was at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School (NJMS) and the Rutgers Biomedical Health Sciences, finishing her long career there as Professor in the Division of Infectious Disease and Director of Research in in the Department of Medicine. Dr. Connell was continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, industry, and other sources from 1992 to 2018.

Alex de Waal is executive director of the World Peace Foundation and Research Professor at the Fletcher School, Tufts University. He has worked on the Horn of Africa, and on conflict, food security and related issues since the 1980s as a researcher and practitioner. He served as a senior advisor to the African Union High Level Panel on Sudan and South Sudan. He was listed among Foreign Policy’s 100 most influential international intellectuals in 2008 and Atlantic’s 29 ‘brave thinkers’ in 2009 and is the recipient of the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Huxley Award. De Waal’s recent books include: The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power (Polity 2015), Mass Starvation: The history and future of famine (Polity 2018), New Pandemics, Old Politics: 200 years of the war on disease and its alternatives (Polity 2021), and (as co-author), Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy: The promise and betrayal of a people’s revolution (Hurst and Oxford 2022).

Alexander B. Downes is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs and co-Director of the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at The George Washington University. Downes's book Targeting Civilians in War was published by Cornell University Press in 2008 and won the Joseph Lepgold Prize awarded by Georgetown University for the best book in international relations published in that year. Targeting Civilians in War previously won the Helen Dwight Reid Award for best dissertation in international relations, law, and politics in 2006 from the American Political Science Association. His second book, Catastrophic Success: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Goes Wrong was published, also by Cornell, in 2021. Downes has written on a variety of subjects in international security, including civilian victimization, foreign-imposed regime change, military effectiveness, democracy, coercion, alliances, and solutions to civil wars. His work can be found in journals like the British Journal of Political Science, Civil Wars, International Organization, International Security, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Strategic Studies, and Security Studies, as well as multiple edited volumes. In 2016, Downes was named the winner of the inaugural Emerging Scholar Award, given by the International Security Studies Section of the International Studies Association to recognize scholars under the age of 45, or within fifteen years of receiving the Ph.D., who are judged to have made (through the body of their publications) the most significant contribution to the field of security studies. Downes has held fellowships at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (2007/08) and Olin Institute for Strategic Studies (2002/03), and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (2003/04) at Stanford University. His work has been funded by the Department of Defense Minerva Initiative, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Eisenhower Institute, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, and Office of Naval Research. Downes teaches a variety of courses on IR and international security for undergraduates, M.A. students at the Elliott School, and Ph.D. students in Political Science. In recognition of his efforts in the classroom, Downes received the 2020 Harry Harding Teaching Prize from the Elliott School. Before joining the GW faculty, Downes was Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University from 2004-2011.

Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economist and a demographer by training, is also a senior adviser to the National Board of Asian Research, a member of the visiting committee at the Harvard School of Public Health, and a member of the Global Leadership Council at the World Economic Forum. He researches and writes extensively on economic development, foreign aid, global health, demographics, and poverty. He is the author of numerous monographs and articles on North and South Korea, East Asia, and countries of the former Soviet Union. His books range from The End of North Korea to The Poverty of the Poverty Rate.

Kimberly Ann Elliott is a Nonresident Fellow with the Center for Global Development and a Visiting Scholar with the Institute for International Economic Policy at George Washington University. She is the author or co-author of numerous books and articles on trade policy and globalization, economic sanctions, and food security. Her most recent book is Global Agriculture and the American Farmer: Opportunities for U.S. Leadership (2017), a follow on to Delivering on Doha: Farm Trade and the Poor (2006). Her co-authored publications include Economic Sanctions Reconsidered, Can Labor Standards Improve under Globalization, and Reciprocity and Retaliation in U.S. Trade Policy. She is a member of the US Department of Labor’s National Advisory Committee for Labor Provisions in US Free Trade Agreements and has served on a number of official advisory committees, including the State Department’s Working Group on Economic Sanctions, the National Research Council committee on Monitoring International Labor Standards, and the USDA Consultative Group on the Elimination of Child Labor in US Agricultural Imports. She has an MA, with distinction, from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and, in 2004, Austin College named her a Distinguished Alumna.

Liana Fix is a fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). She is a historian and political scientist, with expertise in German and European foreign and security policy, European security, transatlantic relations, Russia, Eastern Europe, and European China policy. Dr. Fix is also the author of A New German Power? Germany’s Role in European Russia Policy. She is an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown University in the Center for German and European Studies and the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies. Prior to joining CFR, Dr. Fix was program director for international affairs at Körber-Stiftung in Berlin. She was also a resident fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Washington, DC, and a DAAD/AICGS fellow at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies. From 2018 to 2019, she was a fellow for global governance futures at the Robert Bosch Foundation Multilateral Dialogues. From 2014 to 2016, Dr. Fix was a doctoral fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs and associate fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations. From 2012 to 2013, Dr. Fix worked as a Mercator fellow for international affairs at the German Federal Foreign Office, the EU Delegation in Tbilisi, and the Carnegie Moscow Center. Dr. Fix has contributed essays, policy papers, and articles to peer-reviewed journals including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and the Washington Quarterly, among others. She is also a frequent contributor to international and German-language media.

Page Fortna is the Harold Brown Professor of US Foreign and Security Policy in the Political Science Department at Columbia University. Her research focuses on terrorism, the durability of peace in the aftermath of both civil and interstate wars, and war termination. She is the author of two books: Does Peacekeeping Work? Shaping Belligerents Choices after Civil War (Princeton University Press, 2008) and Peace Time: Cease-Fire Agreements and the Durability of Peace (Princeton University Press, 2004). She has published articles in journals such as International Organization, World Politics, International Studies Quarterly, and International Studies Review. She is currently working on a project on terrorism in civil wars. Her research combines quantitative and qualitative methods, draws on diverse theoretical approaches, and focuses on policy-relevant questions. Fortna is a member of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. She received the Karl Deutsch Award from the International Studies Association in 2010. She has held fellowships at the Olin Institute at Harvard, the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Hoover Institution. Professor Fortna teaches courses on international politics, war termination and the durability of peace, terrorism, cooperation and security, and research methods. Professor Fortna's article "Do Terrorists Win? Rebels' Use of Terrorism and Civil War Outcomes" (International Organization, Summer 2015) has recently been highlighted in The Atlantic; Slate; and Die Zeit.

Chas W. Freeman, Jr. is a former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. After 30 years as a U.S. diplomat, he became the chairman of Projects International in 1995. He served as the principal interpreter during President Nixon's historic visit to China in 1972. He is also currently president of the Middle East Policy Council, co-chair of the U.S. China Policy Foundation, vice-chair of the Atlantic Council, a trustee of the Institute for Defense Analyses — and a director of the Pacific Pension Institute. Mr. Freeman has been published in The New York Times and wrote two books titled "Arts of Power: Statecraft and Diplomacy" and "The Diplomat's Dictionary."

Kevin P. Gallagher is Associate Professor of International Relations at Boston University who specializes in economic development, trade and investment policy, international environmental policy, and Latin America. He is the author of “The Dragon in the Room: China and the Future of Latin American Industrialization” (with Roberto Porzecanski), “The Enclave Economy: Foreign Investment and Sustainable Development in Mexico’s Silicon Valley” (with Lyuba Zarsky), and “Free Trade and the Environment: Mexico, NAFTA, and Beyond.” Gallagher has edited or co-edited a number of books, including “Rethinking Foreign Investment for Sustainable Development: Lessons from Latin America” (with Daniel Chudnovsky) and “Putting Development First: the Importance of Policy Space in the WTO and IFIs.” Gallagher is the coordinator of Boston University’s Global Development Policy Program. He is a faculty fellow at BU’s Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future where he leads the Global Economic Governance Initiative. Gallagher is also a research associate at the Global Development and Environment Institute of Tufts University and at the Political Economy Research Institute of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has served as a visiting or adjunct professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University; Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government; El Colegio de Mexico in Mexico; Tsinghua University in China; and the Center for the Study of State and Society in Argentina. Gallagher is co-editor of the Review of International Political Economy. In 2009, he served on the investment subcommittee of the US Department of State’s Advisory Committee on International Economic Policy. He currently serves on the National Advisory Committee to the North American Free Trade Agreement at the US Environmental Protection Agency and as a member of the Inter-American Dialogue’s China and Latin America Working Group. Professor Gallagher writes regular columns on global economic and development policy for The Guardian, Financial Times, and Al-Jazeera. He co-chairs the Triple Crisis blog.

F. Gregory Gause III is Professor of International Affairs and John H. Lindsey ’44 Chair at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University. From fall 2014 through summer 2022 he served as Head of the School’s Department of International Affairs. He is currently working at the School's Washington, D.C. teaching site. He is the author of three books and numerous articles on the politics of the Middle East, with a particular focus on the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf. He was previously on the faculties of the University of Vermont (1995-2014) and Columbia University (1987-1995) and was Fellow for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York (1993-1994). During the 2009-10 academic year he was Kuwait Foundation Visiting Professor of International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. In spring 2009 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the American University in Kuwait. In spring 2010 he was a research fellow at the King Faisal Center for Islamic Studies and Research in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. His research focuses on the international politics of the Middle East, particularly the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf. He has published three books, most recently The International Relations of the Persian Gulf (Cambridge University Press, 2010). His articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Middle East Journal, Security Studies, Washington Quarterly, National Interest, and in other journals and edited volumes. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University in 1987 and his B.A. (summa cum laude) from St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia in 1980. He studied Arabic at the American University in Cairo (1982-83) and Middlebury College (1984).

Jack A. Goldstone (PhD Harvard) is the Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, Jr., Chair Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University, a Senior Fellow of the Mercatus Center, and a Global Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center. Previously, Dr. Goldstone was on the faculty of Northwestern University and the University of California, and has been a visiting scholar at Cambridge University, Stanford University, UCLA, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the California Institute of Technology. He has received the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship award from the American Sociological Association, the Arnoldo Momigliano Prize, the Barrington Moore Jr. Award, the Myron Weiner Award, the Ibn Khaldun Award, and fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the JS Guggenheim Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Mellon Foundation. He also served as the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Visitor to the American Academy in Berlin. A life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Dr. Goldstone is also an Academic Fellow of the European Policy Council, and served on the International Advisory Board of the Gaidar Institute (Moscow). He led a National Academy of Sciences study of USAID’s democracy assistance policies, and has served as a consultant on state fragility to USAID, Britain’s DFID, and the OECD. Dr. Goldstone’s research focuses on the impact of global population changes on social and economic development. His 2010 essay in Foreign Affairs – “The New Population Bomb: The Four Megatrends that will Change the World” – has been widely cited as a critical guide to the impact of future population change. He has been a keynote speaker at events in Oslo, Moscow, Antalya, Delhi, Beijing, Berlin, Aspen and New York, and appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera, CCTV, Russia Today, and Fox News. His recent books include the Handbook of Revolutions in the 21 ^st Century (Springer, 2022), International Handbook of Population Policies (Springer 2022) and Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford U. Press 2023).

Kelly M. Greenhill is the Director of the MIT Seminar XXI Program, Resident Senior Research Fellow at MIT, and a faculty member at both​ Tufts University and at MIT’s Center for International Studies. Greenhill is author of Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion, and Foreign Policy (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs 2010—second edition forthcoming), winner of the 2011 International Studies Association Best Book of the Year Award; and co-author and co-editor of Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict (Cornell); The Use of Force: Military Power and International Politics, 8th ed. (Rowman and Littlefield); and Coercion: The Power to Hurt in International Politics (Oxford). Her research has also appeared in a variety of journals, including International Security, Security Studies, International Studies Quarterly, Civil Wars, European Law Journal and International Migration, as well as in media outlets, such as the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, the BBC, and in briefs prepared for the U.S. Supreme Court and other organs of the US government. Greenhill is currently revising for publication another new book, a cross-national study of the influence of “extra-factual” sources of information, such as rumors, conspiracy theories, propaganda, and so-called “fake news” on international politics. The book is provisionally entitled Fear and Present Danger: Extra-factual Sources of Threat Conception and Proliferation. Greenhill holds an SM and a PhD from MIT, a CSS from Harvard, and a BA from UC Berkeley. She has held fellowships at Stanford’s Center for Security and Cooperation, Harvard’s Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, Harvard's Belfer Center, the University of Cambridge (UK), Columbia’s Saltzman Institute and SOAS (U of London, UK).

Admiral Harry Harris is the former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea (2018-2021) and former Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command (2015-2018). Prior to this, he commanded the U.S. Pacific Fleet, U.S. SIXTH Fleet, Striking and Support Forces NATO, Joint Task Force Guantanamo, Patrol and Reconnaissance Wing ONE, and VP-46. He has served in every geographic combatant command region and participated in major operations that included S.S. Achille Lauro terrorist hijacking incident, Attain Document (Libya 1986), Desert Shield/Desert Storm, Enduring Freedom, Iraqi Freedom, and Odyssey Dawn (Libya 2011). Harris’s other assignments included serving as aide to the Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Japan, chief speechwriter for the Chairman of the JCS, Director of Operations for U.S. FIFTH Fleet, Director of Operations for U.S. Southern Command, Deputy CNO for Communications Networks, and Director of Current Operations and Anti-terrorism/Force Protection Policy. In 2011, he was the direct representative of the Chairman of the JCS to the Secretary of State with additional duties as the U.S. roadmap monitor for the Mid-East Peace Process (Oslo Accords).  A 1999-2000 Seminar XXI Fellow, he holds Master's degrees from Harvard and Georgetown, and also studied at Oxford University.  Harris has logged over 4,400 flight hours, including more than 400 combat hours, in maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft. He has received numerous awards including two Defense Distinguished Service Medals, three Navy Distinguished Service Medals, two Bronze Stars, the State Department’s Distinguished Honor Award, several national awards recognizing his work in diversity, and two CIA awards -- the Agency Seal Medal and the Ambassador's Award.  He has been decorated by the governments of Australia, France, Japan, the Philippines, Mongolia, Singapore, and South Korea. 

Ron E. Hassner is Chancellor's Professor of Political Science and Diller Family Chair in Israel Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.  He is a faculty director of the Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies. Ron studies the role of symbols and ideas in international security with particular attention to the relationship between religion and violence. His publications have focused on territorial disputes, religion in the military, conflicts over holy places, and the pervasive role of religion on the modern battlefield. His recent publications include Anatomy of Torture; Religion in the Military Worldwide; Religion on the Battlefield; and War on Sacred Grounds.  He founded, and was first chair, of the “Religion and International Relations” section of the International Studies Association, and he edits the Cornell University Press series on "Religion and Conflict".

Bruce Hoffman has been studying terrorism and insurgency for nearly five decades. He is a professor at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and also the Shelby Cullom and Kathryn W. Davis Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the George H. Gilmore Senior Fellow at the U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center. Hoffman was appointed a commissioner on the FBI 9/11 Review Commission by the U.S. Congress and has been Scholar-in-Residence for Counterterrorism at the Central Intelligence Agency; adviser on counterterrorism to the Coalition Provisional Authority, Baghdad, Iraq; and, adviser on counterinsurgency to Multi-National Forces—Iraq Headquarters, Baghdad, Iraq. He is the recipient of the United States Intelligence Community Seal Medallion, the highest commendation given to a non-government employee. Hoffman is the author of several award-winning books. His latest book is God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America (Columbia University Press).

Donald Horowitz is the James B. Duke Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago Law School and the Central European University; as well as a Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, at the Law Faculty of the University of Canterbury, and at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. In 2009, he was presented with the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Section of the International Studies Association. His recent published books include: Ethnic Groups in Conflict; A Democratic South Africa? Constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society; The Deadly Ethnic Riot; and Indonesia's Path to Constitutional Democracy, to be published in 2012.

Jolyon Howorth is the Jean Monnet Professor ad personam and Professor Emeritus of European Politics at the University of Bath (UK). He was Visiting Professor of Political Science at Yale from 2002 to 2018 and a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School from 2018 to 2022. He has held Visiting Professorships at the University of Washington, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Columbia and New York Universities, Sciences-Po, Paris, the Freie Universität Berlin, the Australian Defence Force Academy, and Luiss Guido Carli University (Rome). He has held a Senior Research Fellowship at the European Union’s Institute for Security Studies. He is a Senior Research Associate at the Institut Français des Relations Internationales (Paris), a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts (UK), Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques (France), and has been a Member of the Advisory Boards of the European Institute for Public Administration (Netherlands), the Centre for Defence Studies(UK), the Institut de Recherche Stratégique de l'Ecole Militaire (Paris), the Centre National Jean Jaurès (France), the European Policy Centre (Brussels) and the Centre for the Study of Security and Diplomacy (UK). He has published extensively in the field of European security and defense policy and transatlantic relations. Recent books include: Security and Defence Policy in the European Union, (2007, 2014); Defending Europe: the EU, NATO and the Quest for European Autonomy, (2003); European Integration and Defence: The Ultimate Challenge? (2000). In 2019, he was awarded French citizenship in recognition of his scholarship on French politics and history.

Benjamin Jensen is a senior fellow for Futures Lab in the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He is also a professor of strategic studies at the Marine Corps University School of Advanced Warfighting. Dr. Jensen has spent the last decade researching the changing character of political violence, technology, and strategy. He has worked with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, NATO, the U.S. Army, and a range of government agencies and foundations to develop wargames and scenario-driven exercises exploring strategy, defense analysis, crisis response, military planning, and complex emergencies. Outside of traditional defense and security issues, he supported the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in developing a human security assessment framework and a red team manual for early-warning analysts and development practitioners. He is the author of four books including the forthcoming Information at War: Military Innovation, Battle Networks, and the Future of Artificial Intelligence (Georgetown University Press, 2022), Military Strategy in the 21st Century: People, Connectivity, and Competition (Cambria, 2018), Cyber Strategy: The Evolving Character of Power and Coercion (Oxford University Press, 2018), and Forging the Sword: Doctrinal Change in the U.S. Army (Stanford University Press 2016). Most recently, he served as the senior research director and lead author for the U.S. Cyberspace Solarium Commission. Dr. Jensen is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and received his MA and PhD from the American University School of International Service. He is also a reserve officer in the U.S. Army.

Stephen B. Kaplan is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs in the Department of Political Science at George Washington University, and a current fellow at the Wilson Center.  His research and teaching interests are on the frontiers of international and comparative political economy, where he specializes in the political economy of global finance and development, the politics of macroeconomic policy-making, Chinese foreign economic policy, and Latin American politics. His book, Globalization and Austerity Politics in Latin America, was published by Cambridge University Press (in the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics Series) in 2013, and was selected for Choice’s Outstanding Academic Titles in the Social and Behavioral Sciences that same year. The book is based on his doctoral dissertation, which was awarded the 2010 Mancur Olson Award for Best Dissertation in Political Economy by the American Political Science Association. Kaplan is currently working on his second book manuscript, Globalizing Patient Capital: The Political Economy of Chinese Finance in the Americas (under contract with Cambridge University Press), which aims to evaluate the political and policy making implications of growing Chinese economic interdependence in the Western Hemisphere. His current research also examines debtor-creditor relations in global finance, the role of technocratic communities in shaping economic policy, and the rise of emerging powers. I have published articles in The Journal of Politics, Electoral Studies, Latin American Research Review, Review of International Political Economy, and World Development. 

David Keith is Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and founder of Carbon Engineering, a company developing technology to capture CO2 from ambient air to make carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuels. Keith has worked near the interface between climate science, energy technology, and public policy for twenty-five years, and he is known for his work on the science, technology, and public policy of solar geoengineering. He is the author of A Case for Climate Engineering, which provides a clear and accessible overview of the costs and risks, and how climate engi-neering might fit into a larger program for managing climate change.

James Kunder is principal at Kunder/Reali Associates, an Alexandria, Virginia-based consulting firm, specializing in international development, post-conflict reconstruction and civil-military relations.  Concurrently, he serves as an Affiliated Expert at The Lugar Center, in Washington, DC, and as a member of the Executive Committee of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network. In 2014-15, working with Palladium, Kunder led a major evaluation project for the Department of State Bureau of Intelligence and Research, examining whether U.S. Government programs attempting to counter violent extremism abroad were achieving their objectives. Kunder has extensive government and private sector experience managing international development, relief and reconstruction programs.  At USAID, Kunder has served as Acting Deputy Administrator, Assistant Administrator for Asia and the Near East, Director for Relief and Reconstruction in Afghanistan, and Director of the Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance. In the private sector, Kunder was Vice President for Program Development at Save the Children Federation. He has also served as a legislative director in the U.S. House of Representatives, and was a candidate for Congress in Pennsylvania’s Fourth Congressional District.  Prior to his service on Capitol Hill, he was on active military duty as an infantry platoon commander in the U.S. Marine Corps. He currently teaches at the U.S. Foreign Service Institute, at USAID, and at the Marine Corps University. He has authored numerous publications on international humanitarian issues, reconstruction, peacekeeping and crisis management.

Joshua Landis is Director of the Center for Middle East Studies and Professor at the University of Oklahoma’s College of International Studies. He writes “Syria Comment,” a daily newsletter on Syrian politics that attracts over 100,000 readers a month. Dr. Landis travels frequently to Washington DC to consult with government agencies and speak at think tanks. Most recently he has spoken at the Woodrow Wilson Institute, Brookings Institute, USIP, Middle East Institute, and Council on Foreign Relations. He is a frequent analyst on TV and radio, most recently he has appeared on PBS News Hour, The Charlie Rose Show, al-Jazeera, Frontline, NPR and BBC radio. He is frequently published in such journals as Foreign Policy, & Middle East Policy. His most recent publications include: “Why Syria is the Gordian knot of Obama's anti-ISIL campaign”, Al Jazeera America, Sept 15, 2014; “Why Asad Is Likely to Survive to 2013” Middle East Policy 19:1 Spring 2012; and “Stay Out of Syria” June 5, 2012, Foreign Policy. He has won the best teacher prize at his university; helped raised over one million dollars for a new chair in Iranian studies, and helped bring the government funded Arabic Flagship Program to OU. Three Fulbright grants, the SSRC and other awards have helped support his research.

Christopher Layne is University Distinguished Professor of International Affairs and Robert M. Gates Chair in National Security at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. His fields of interest are international relations theory, great power politics, US foreign policy, and grand strategy. Professor Layne has written two books: The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present and (with Bradley A. Thayer) American Empire: A Debate. His current book project, After the Fall: International Politics, U.S. Grand Strategy, and the End of the Pax Americana, is under contract with Yale University Press. Additionally, he has contributed extensively to the debates about international relations theory and American foreign policy in such scholarly and policy journals as International Security, International Studies Quarterly, International History Review, Security Studies, International Politics, Review of International Studies, Journal of Strategic Studies, The National Interest, Foreign Policy, The Washington Quarterly, World Policy Journal, and Orbis. Professor Layne has been a frequent contributor to The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Nation, Financial Times, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and The Australian. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is a member of the Editorial Board of Security Studies. In May/June 2014, he was a visiting fellow at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo.

James Lewis is a senior fellow and director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at CSIS, where he focuses on technology, national security, and the international economy. Before joining CSIS, he worked in the federal government as a foreign service officer and as a member of the senior executive service. His assignments involved Asian regional security, military intervention and insurgency, conventional arms negotiations, technology transfer, sanctions, Internet policy, and military space programs. Lewis has authored numerous CSIS publications with the theme of how government policies adjust to technological innovation. They include Building an Information Technology Industry in China: National Strategy, Global Markets; Foreign Influence on Software: Risks and Recourse; Waiting for Sputnik: Basic Research and Strategic Competition; Globalization and National Security; Spectrum Management for the 21st Century; Assessing the Risk of Cyber Terrorism; and Preserving America’s Strength in Satellite Technology.

Roy Licklider, Professor of Political Science, received his B.A. from Boston University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in international relations from Yale. He taught at Tougaloo College before coming to Rutgers in l968. He has taught courses in international relations, foreign and military policy, terrorism, research design, international political economy, and the comparative politics of higher education. His early research was concerned with nuclear strategy, comparative foreign policy, and the impact of economic sanctions on foreign policy, particularly the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74. His recent research has focused on how people who have been killing one another in civil wars with considerable skill and enthusiasm can sometimes—but more often than you might think—form working political communities. He is Adjunct Research Scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia and has taught at Princeton and Yale. He has been a member of the Inter-University Consortium for Foreign Policy Research and the University Seminar on Reconciliation at Columbia University, President of the Comparative Foreign Policy Section of the International Studies Association, Program Officer at the Exxon Education Foundation, and consultant for the Political Instability Task Force at Science Applications International Corporation.

Dr. Herb Lin is senior research scholar for cyber policy and security at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and Hank J. Holland Fellow in Cyber Policy and Security at the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford University.  His research interests relate broadly to policy-related dimensions of cybersecurity and cyberspace, and he is particularly interested in and knowledgeable about the use of offensive operations in cyberspace, especially as instruments of national policy.  In addition to his positions at Stanford University, he is Chief Scientist, Emeritus for the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies, where he served from 1990 through 2014 as study director of major projects on public policy and information technology, and Adjunct Senior Research Scholar and Senior Fellow in Cybersecurity (not in residence) at the Saltzman Institute for War and Peace Studies in the School for International and Public Affairs at Columbia University; and a member of the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. He recently served on President Obama’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity.  Prior to his NRC service, he was a professional staff member and staff scientist for the House Armed Services Committee (1986-1990), where his portfolio included defense policy and arms control issues. His recent publications include Attribution of Malicious Cyber Incidents: From Soup to Nuts and Maneuvering The China-U.S. Relationship in Cyberspace.

Marc Lynch is Associate Professor of Political Science at George Washington University and the Elliott School of International Affairs. He received his Ph.D. in 1997 from Cornell University and his BA from Duke University in 1990. He works on international politics, with a specialty on the Middle East. His current research interests focus on the relationship between new media technologies and Islamist movements, public diplomacy, and Arab public opinion. He also runs the popular Middle East politics blog, Abu Aardvark. He is the author of State Interests and Public Spheres: The International Politics of Jordan's Identity, and Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, al-Jazeera, and Middle East Politics Today. 

Ram Manikkalingam founded and directs the Dialogue Advisory Group (DAG), and teaches politics at the University of Amsterdam. He has extensive experience working on mediation and diplomacy at senior levels in government, civil society and with international organizations. He advised then President Kumaratunga on the ceasefire and reconstruction in peace talks with the Tamil Tigers. He led the Rockefeller Foundation’s work on International Security, where he supported programs to end the recruitment of child soldiers, ban anti-personnel mines and monitor the work of the UN Security Council. At DAG, he led teams that disarmed the Basque separatist armed group ETA, and the Irish Republican dissident armed group INLA, and worked on several efforts to pursue political dialogues in difficult conflict situations. Manikkalingam recently published Tamil Tigers: Dialogue, Terrorism and Nationalism, an eyewitness account and expert exploration of the bloody civil war that engulfed the island of Sri Lanka for nearly three decades.

William McCants is a fellow at Brookings in the Center for Middle East Policy and director of its Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World. He is also adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins University and has held various government and think tank positions related to Islam, the Middle East, and terrorism. From 2009-2011, McCants served as a U.S. State Department senior adviser for countering violent extremism. He has also held positions as program manager of the Minerva Initiative for the Department of Defense; an analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses, the Center for Naval Analyses and SAIC; and a fellow at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. He is the founder of Jihadica.com, an academic group blog focused on the global jihadi movement. The blog has been featured on the cover of the New York Times, and described by Wired magazine’s Danger Room as “the gold standard in militant studies.” His latest book is Founding Gods, Inventing Nations: Conquest and Culture Myths from Antiquity to Islam.

John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982. He graduated from West Point in 1970 and then served five years as an officer in the U.S. Air Force. He then started graduate school in political science at Cornell University in 1975. He received his Ph.D. in 1980. He spent the 1979-1980 academic year as a research fellow at the Brookings Institution and was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs from 1980 to 1982. During the 1998-1999 academic year, he was the Whitney H. Shepardson Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Professor Mearsheimer has written extensively about security issues and international politics more generally. He has published seven books: Conventional Deterrence (1983), which won the Edgar S. Furniss, Jr., Book Award; Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (1988); The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001, 2014), which won the Joseph Lepgold Book Prize and has been translated into ten different languages; The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (with Stephen M. Walt, 2007), which made the New York Times best seller list and has been translated into twenty-six different languages; Why Leaders Lie: The Truth about Lying in International Politics (2011), which has been translated into thirteen different languages; The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (2018), which has been translated into ten different languages and was the recipient of the 2019 Best Book of the Year Award from the Valdai Discussion Conference, Moscow; and How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy (with Sebastian Rosato, 2023), which has been translated into eleven languages. He has also written many articles that have appeared in academic journals like International Security, and popular magazines like Foreign Affairs, The Economist, and The London Review of Books. Furthermore, he has written op-ed pieces for newspapers like The New York Times and The Financial Times dealing with topics like Bosnia, nuclear proliferation, US policy towards India, the failure of Arab-Israeli peace efforts, the folly of invading Iraq, the causes of the Ukrainian crisis, and the likelihood of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. Finally, Professor Mearsheimer has received several awards and honors. He received the Clark Award for Distinguished Teaching when he was a graduate student at Cornell in 1977, and he won the Quantrell Award for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Chicago in 1985. He was selected as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar for the 1993-1994 academic year. In that capacity, he gave a series of talks at eight colleges and universities. He received honorary doctorates from universities in China, Greece, and Romania; and in 2003, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2020, he won the James Madison Award, which is given once every three years by the American Political Science Association to “an American political scientist who has made a distinguished scholarly contribution to political science.”

James Millward is Professor of Inter-societal History at the Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, teaching Chinese, Central Asian and world history. He also teaches as invited professor in the Máster Oficial en Estudios de Asia Oriental at the University of Granada, Spain. His specialties include Qing empire; the silk road; Eurasian lutes and music in history; and historical and contemporary Xinjiang. He follows and comments on current issues regarding the Uyghurs and PRC ethnicity policy.  Millward has served on the boards of the Association for Asian Studies (China and Inner Asia Council) and the Central Eurasian Studies Society, and was president of the Central Eurasian Studies Society in 2010. He edits the ''Silk Roads'' series for University of Chicago Press. His publications include The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction (2013), Eurasian Crossroads: a History of Xinjiang (2007), New Qing Imperial History: the Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde (2004), and Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity and Empire in Qing Central Asia (1998). His most recent album, recorded with the band By & By, is Songs for this Old Heart. His articles and op-eds on contemporary China appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Global Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Review of Books and other media.

Malik Mufti is a professor of political science at Tufts University. He teaches courses on international relations and the politics of the Middle East, and is a recipient of the Lillian and Joseph Leibner Award for Distinguished Teaching and Advising. He is the author of Sovereign Creations: Pan-Arabism and Political Order in Syria and Iraq (1996), Daring and Caution in Turkish Strategic Culture: Republic at Sea (2009), and The Art of Jihad: Realism in Islamic Political Thought (2019). His recent journal articles include "Democratizing Potential of the 'Arab Spring': Some Early Observations" (Government and Opposition, July 2015); "Turkey at 100: Between Constancy and Change" (International Relations, June 2023); and "Nietzsche, the Muslim Falāsifa, and Leo Strauss's Avicennan Turn" (Review of Politics, Spring 2024). His current project is on the encounter between Islam and America.

Vipin Narang is the Frank Stanton Professor of Nuclear Security and Political Science and member of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been a fellow at Harvard University’s Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, a predoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and a Stanton junior faculty fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. His research interests include nuclear proliferation and strategy, North Korea's nuclear weapons, South Asian security, and general security studies. His first book Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era (Princeton University Press, 2014) on the deterrence strategies of regional nuclear powers won the 2015 ISA International Security Studies Section Best Book Award. His second book Seeking the Bomb: Strategies of Nuclear Proliferation is forthcoming with Princeton University Press. His work has appeared in a variety of outlets including International Security, Journal of Conflict Resolution, The Washington Quarterly, International Organization, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. He was the recipient of the 2020 ISSS Emerging Scholar Award from the International Studies Association awarded to the scholar who “had made the most significant contribution to the field of security studies.”

Abraham Newman is a professor in the School of Foreign Service and Government Department at Georgetown University. His research focuses on the ways in which economic interdependence and globalization have transformed international politics. He is the author with Henry Farrell of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (Holt/Penguin 2023); Of Privacy and Power: The Transatlantic Struggle over Freedom and Security (Princeton University Press 2019), which is the winner of the 2019 Chicago-Kent College of Law / Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize, the 2020 International Studies Association ICOMM Best Book Award, and one of Foreign Affairs’ Best Books of 2019, with Elliot Posner of Voluntary Disruptions: International Soft Law, Finance, and Power (Oxford University Press: 2018), which won an Honorable Mention from the American Political Science Association’s International Collaboration Section Best Book Award 2018 and an Honorable Mention from the International Studies Association’s International Law Section Best Book Award 2019, Protectors of Privacy: Regulating Personal Data in the Global Economy (Cornell University Press: 2008) and co-editor of How Revolutionary was the Digital Revolution: National Responses, Market Transitions, and Global Technologies (Stanford University Press: 2006). His work has appeared in a range of journals including Comparative Political Studies, International Organization, International Security, Nature, Science, and World Politics. He is a regular commentator on current events appearing on programs like NPR and Deutsche Welle and writing for news outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. He received his BA in International Relations from Stanford University and his PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Manuel Orozco is the Director of the Migration, Remittances, and Development Program at the Inter-American Dialogue. He also serves as a Senior Fellow at Harvard University’s Center for International Development and as a Senior Adviser with the International Fund for Agricultural Development. Orozco has conducted extensive research, policy analysis and advocacy on issues relating to global flows of remittances as well as migration and development worldwide. He is Chair of Central America and the Caribbean at the US Foreign Service Institute and Senior Researcher at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University. Orozco frequently testifies before Congress and has spoken before the United Nations. Orozco has published widely on remittances, Latin America, globalization, democracy, migration, conflict in war torn societies, and minority politics. His books include International Norms and Mobilization for Democracy (2002), Remittances: Global Opportunities for International Person-to-Person Money Transfers (2005), América Latina y el Caribe: Desarrollo, migración y remesas (2012) and Migrant Remittances and Development in the Global Economy (2013).

Roland Paris is University Research Chair in International Security and Governance at the University of Ottawa, founding Director of the Centre for International Policy Studies, and Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. His research interests are in the fields of international security, international governance and foreign policy. Before joining the University of Ottawa in 2006, he was Director of Research at the Conference Board of Canada, the country's largest think tank; foreign policy advisor in the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Privy Council Office of the Canadian government; Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado-Boulder; and Visiting Researcher at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. He has won two awards for public service and four awards for teaching. Paris' writings have appeared in leading academic journals including International Security and International Studies Quarterly. His book “At War's End: Building Peace After Civil Conflict” (Cambridge University Press, 2004) won the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving Global Order and the International Studies Association's prize for best book on multilateralism. He has co-edited two other volumes on peacebuilding, and is co-editor of the Security & Governance book series at Routledge. In 2012 Paris was appointed a Global Ethics Fellow by the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs. He is also a fellow of the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute, and a member of the board of directors of the World University Service of Canada.

Janos Pasztor is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and Executive Director of the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative (C2G). He has over 35 years of work experience in the areas of energy, environment, climate change, and sustainable development. Before taking up his current assignment he was UN assistant secretary-general for climate change in New York under Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Earlier, he was acting executive director for conservation (2014) and policy and science director (2012-2014) at WWF International. He directed the UNSG’s Climate Change Support Team (2008-2010) and later was executive secretary of the UNSG’s High-level Panel on Global Sustainability (2010-2012). In 2007 he directed the Geneva-based UN Environment Management Group (EMG). During 1993-2006 he worked, and over time held many responsibilities at the Climate Change Secretariat (UNFCCC), initially in Geneva and later in Bonn. His other assignments included: in the Secretariat of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (Earth Summit ’92); Stockholm Environment Institute; United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP); Secretariat of the World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission); the Beijer Institute; and the World Council of Churches.

Kenneth Pollack is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he works on Middle Eastern political-military affairs. Dr. Pollack began his career as a Persian Gulf military analyst at the CIA. He then served twice on the National Security Council, first as director for Near East and South Asian affairs and then as director for Persian Gulf affairs. Before joining AEI, Dr. Pollack was a senior fellow of the Brookings Institution for 15 years, where he also served as the director of research and then the director of the Brookings Center for Middle East Policy. Dr. Pollack is the author of 10 books, including most recently, Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness.

Daryl Press is a Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and the Director of the Dartmouth Institute on Global Security. His research focuses on U.S. foreign policy, deterrence, and the future of warfare. He has published two books, Calculating Credibility (2005) and The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution (2020), and his work has appeared in leading academic journals such as International Security, the American Political Science Review, and Security Studies, as well as in the popular press including Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, and The Atlantic Monthly. Press is the co-founder of the Strategic Forces Bootcamp, in partnership with Sandia National Laboratories, and the Seminar on Conventional Force Analysis—a project to revitalize the field of open-source conventional force analysis.  He received his undergraduate education at the University of Chicago and his PhD from MIT.

Marc Raibert is Executive Director of The AI Institute, a new Hyundai-owned research lab devoted to advancing both the intelligence of robots and their physical skills. He is also Chairman of Boston Dynamics, which he founded in 1992. Prior to Boston Dynamics, Raibert was a professor of computer science at CMU and MIT, where he created the Leg Laboratory, a lab that helped establish the scientific basis for highly dynamic robots. Raibert is a Founding Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He was named Pioneer in Robotics in 2022 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and received the 2022 Engelberger Award in Technology, the world's most prestigious robotics honor. Two of Raibert's robots, the One-legged Hopper and BigDog, were inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame.

Natan Sachs is the Director of the Brookings Institution's Center for Middle East Policy. His research focuses on Israel's foreign policy, its domestic politics, and on U.S. policy toward the Middle East. Sachs frequently publishes, appears on, and is quoted by such outlets as Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, BBC, PBS, and NPR. He has provided Congressional testimony and has taught at Georgetown University as an adjunct professor. Before joining Brookings, Sachs was a Hewlett Fellow at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, a Fulbright Fellow in Indonesia, and a Visiting Fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies. Sachs holds a B.A. from the Amirim Honors Program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University.

Justin Sandefur is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development and Co-Director of CGD’s Education Program. His research spans the economics of education and health, among other fields – including large-scale field experiments on topics such as outsourcing public schools in Liberia, scaling up successful education reforms with the Kenyan government, nationwide democratic deliberation on the use of natural resource revenues in Tanzania, and an evaluation of GAVI's impact on vaccination rates in middle-income countries. Prior to joining CGD, he was a resident adviser to the Tanzanian government in Dar es Salaam and a research officer at Oxford's Centre for the Study of African Economies. He has taught as a visiting professor at Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service, served as a consultant for the World Bank and various United Nations agencies, and as a member of the Millennium Challenge Corporation's economic advisory council. He holds a doctorate in economics from Oxford University.

Ben Ross Schneider is a Professor of Political Science at MIT, and his research interests fall within the general fields of comparative politics, political economy, and Latin American politics. His books include Politics within the State: Elite Bureaucrats and Industrial Policy in Authoritarian Brazil, Business and the State in Developing Countries, Reinventing Leviathan: The Politics of Administrative Reform in Developing Countries, and Business Politics and the State in 20th Century Latin America. He also has written on topics such as economic reform, democratization, technocracy, the developmental state, business groups, and comparative bureaucracy.

Oxana Shevel is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University, and Director of Tufts International Relations program. She's also current Vice President of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies (AAUS) and of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN).  Professor Shevel's research and teaching focuses on the post-Soviet region, especially Ukraine and Russia, and issues such as nation building and identity politics, citizenship policies, memory politics, church-state relations, and democratization process in the post-Soviet region. She is a co-author (with Maria Popova) of Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States (Polity, 2024) which discusses the root causes of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Her earlier book, Migration, Refugee Policy, and State Building in Postcommunist Europe (Cambridge, 2011) which examines how the politics of national identity and strategies of the UNHCR shape refugee admission policies in the post-Communist region, leading countries to be more or less receptive to refugees, won the 2012 American Association of Ukrainian Studies (AAUS) prize for best book in the fields of Ukrainian history, politics, language, literature and culture. Professor Shevel’s research appeared in a variety of journals, including Comparative Politics, Current History, East European Politics and Societies, Europe-Asia Studies, Geopolitics, Journal of Democracy, Nationality Papers, Post-Soviet Affairs, Slavic Review and in edited volumes. Her policy commentary has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Just Security, Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and in other national and international media outlets. Outside of Tufts Oxana Shevel is a country expert on Ukraine for Global Citizenship Observatory (GLOBALCIT), a board member of the  Shevchenko Scientific Society (NTShA), a member of PONARS Eurasia scholarly networks, and an associate of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. She holds a PhD in Government from Harvard University, an M.Phil in International Relations from the University of Cambridge in England, and a BA in English and French from Kyiv State University in Ukraine.

Michael Singh is managing director of The Washington Institute and a former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council. At the White House, Mr. Singh was responsible for devising and implementing strategies on a wide range of Middle East issues, from efforts to prevent Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons capability, to the Arab-Israeli peace process, to promoting human rights in the region. He served in the NSC for three years, as senior director for Middle East affairs and as director for Iran and for Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and North Africa. Previously, Mr. Singh served as special assistant to secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell and was staff assistant to then ambassador Daniel Kurtzer at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv. A member of the Harvard International Review's Board of Advisors, Mr. Singh has written extensively on Iran, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and U.S. national security strategy and management. His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, World Affairs, the American Interest, the Economist, Foreign Affairs online, and other publications. He is a regular contributor to ForeignPolicy.com, and appears frequently in national and global media outlets such as Fox News, NBC, CBS, and the BBC.

Paul Staniland is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and a nonresident scholar in the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is also the faculty chair of the Committee on International Relations MA program. His research focuses on political violence and international security in South Asia. His first book, Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse, was published by Cornell University Press in 2014. His second book, Ordering Violence: Explaining Armed Group-State Relations from Conflict to Cooperation, was published by Cornell in 2021. Both won multiple awards. Staniland is in the early stages of a book project on the consequences of major power competition for the internal politics of “swing” states in South and Southeast Asia since 1945.

Andrew Tabler is the Martin J. Gross Fellow in the Program on Arab Politics at The Washington Institute, where he focuses on Syria and U.S. policy in the Levant. Mr. Tabler achieved unparalleled long-term access to Bashar al-Assad's Syria. During fourteen years of residence in the Middle East, Mr. Tabler served as co-founder and editor-in-chief of Syria Today, Syria's first private-sector English-language magazine; as a consultant on U.S.-Syria relations for the International Crisis Group (2008); and as a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs (2005-2007), writing on Syrian, Lebanese, and Middle Eastern affairs. Following his graduate work in Cairo, Egypt, Mr. Tabler held editorships with the Middle East Times and Cairo Times, where he focused on Arab-Israeli peace negotiations, before becoming senior editor and director of editorial for the Oxford Business Group (OBG). In 2001, Mr. Tabler personally oversaw with OBG the first comprehensive English-language report on Syria in more than thirty years. Mr. Tabler has lived, worked and studied extensively in Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia, and Turkey. Mr. Tabler has interviewed Syrian first lady Asma al-Assad, the late Israeli president Shimon Peres, the late Palestinian president Yasser Arafat, slain Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, and former Lebanese prime ministers Fouad Siniora and Saad Hariri. His articles and opinion pieces on Middle East affairs and U.S. foreign policy have appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, Newsweek, Foreign Policy, and Foreign Affairs. He has also appeared in interviews with CNN, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, and the BBC. Mr. Tabler is author of "Syria's Collapse and How Washington Can Stop It" (Foreign Affairs, July-August 2013) and the 2011 book In the Lion's Den: An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle with Syria.

Ömer Taşpınar is a Professor of Security Studies at the National War College (part of National Defense University) in Washington DC.  He also teaches at the Johns Hopkins University, SAIS (School of Advanced International Studies). His areas of expertise include Turkey, Kurdish nationalism, Political Islam, American Foreign Policy, the Middle East, the European Union, and Muslims in Europe. He is the author of four books: Kurdish Nationalism and Political Islam: Kemalist Identity in Transition (Routledge, 2005); Wining Turkey: How the EU and the US can Restore a Fading Partnership (with Philip Gordon, Brookings, 2008); What the West is Getting Wrong about the Middle East: Why Islam is not the Problem (I.B. Tauris, 2020); The Nation or the Ummah: Islamism and Turkish Foreign Policy (with Birol Baskan, Sunny Press, 2021).

Monica Duffy Toft is Professor of International Politics at The Fletcher School at Tufts University. Previously, Toft was Professor of Strategy for the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and Professor of Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government. She taught at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where she directed the Initiative on Religion in International Affairs and was the assistant director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies. Prior to this, she spent four years in the United States Army as a Russian linguist. Toft’s areas of research include international security, ethnic and religious violence, civil wars and demography. Her most recent books include: Securing the Peace; Political Demography (with Jack Goldstone and Eric Kaufmann); and God’s Century (with Daniel Philpott and Timothy Shah). In addition she has published numerous scholarly articles and editorials on civil wars, territory and nationalism, demography, and religion in global politics. Her article Islamists and Nationalists: Rebel Motivation and Counterinsurgency in Russia's North Caucasus co-authored with Yuri Zhukov was published in the American Political Science Review in May 2015. Her most recent opinion pieces are on religious fundamentalism and women's equality in the Huffington Post and on the importance of identity politics for Iraq's security at Project Syndicate, a column that appeared in 19 publications in five different languages. Toft was also a supernumerary fellow at Brasenose College, University of Oxford; a Global Scholar of the Peace Research Institute Oslo; a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Minorities at Risk Advisory Board, and the Political Instability Task Force; and in 2008 the Carnegie Foundation of New York named her a Carnegie Scholar for her research on religion and violence.

Dr. Chikako Kawakatsu Ueki is Professor of International Relations at the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies (GSAPS) at Waseda University and currently a research affiliate at MIT. She teaches “International Security” and “International Relations and Security in East Asia.” She served as a member of the Prime Minister’s Council on Security and Defense Capabilities in 2009. Her areas of expertise include causes and prevention of war and East Asian international relations with a special focus on U.S.-Japan-China relations. She has written extensively on issues concerning threat perception in a unipolar world, transformation of international relations after the Cold War, and issues relating to security problems in East Asia. At Waseda University, she leads a program on Political Integration at the Global Institute for Asian Regional Integration (GIARI), and research projects on Security Studies at the Institute for Asia-Pacific Studies (WIASP) and at the Organization for Japan-U.S. Studies (WOJUSS). Her works include: “Repairing the Strategic Safety-Net: Security and Interdependence in East Asia” (2006); “Strategy, Military Power and Security — Senryaku, Gunjiryoku, Anzenhosho” in Access Anzenhoshoron (2005); “International Structural Change and U.S.-Japan-China Relations: The Importance of ‘Liberal Deterrence’ Policy, ” International Affairs (2009); and “Nationalism as a Cause of War: The Case of the Crimean War” (1998). Prior to joining GSAPS, Dr. Ueki was Senior Research Fellow and Professor at the National Institute for Defense Studies, which is the main research arm of the Japan Ministry of Defense. During her appointment at NIDS, she was the main author of the China chapters in the NIDS annual publication: East Asian Strategic Review and reports on strategic assessments.

Luis Videgaray is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Director of MIT AI Policy for the World Project. Prior to coming to MIT, he served as the Foreign Minister and Finance Minister of Mexico. As Foreign Minister (2017-18) he led Mexico´s relationship with the Trump White House, including the successful renegotiation of the NAFTA (now USMCA). He is one of the founders of the Lima Group, created to promote regional diplomatic efforts towards restoring democracy in Venezuela, and conducted Mexico´s leading role in the UN towards an inclusive debate on AI and other new technologies. As Finance Minister (2012-16) he led Mexico's historic energy liberalization, a telecommunications reform to foster competition in the sector, a tax reform that reduced the country's dependence on oil revenues, and the drafting of Mexico's new Fintech Law. He was named Finance Minister of the Year by both The Banker Magazine and Euromoney Magazine, and a Leading Global Thinker by Foreign Policy Magazine. In 2012 he was campaign manager for President Peña Nieto and head of the transition team. Previously, he was a member of Mexico's Congress, where he chaired the Budget Committee, and Secretary of Finance of the State of Mexico. Before government, Mr. Videgaray had a career in investment banking, advising M&A and private equity transactions.

Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University. He previously taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, where he served as Master of the Social Science Collegiate Division and Deputy Dean of Social Sciences. He has been a Resident Associate of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace and a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution, and he has also served as a consultant for the Institute of Defense Analyses, the Center for Naval Analyses, and the National Defense University. He presently serves on the editorial boards of Foreign Policy, Security Studies, International Relations, and Journal of Cold War Studies, and he also serves as Co-Editor of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs, published by Cornell University Press. Additionally, he was elected as a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in May 2005. His book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007, co-authored with John J. Mearsheimer) was a New York Times best seller and has been translated into more than twenty foreign languages. His most recent book is The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018).

Frederic Wehrey is a senior associate in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He focuses on security affairs, civil-military relations, and identity politics in North Africa and the Gulf. Prior to joining Carnegie, he was a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation. Wehrey is also a twenty-year veteran of the active and reserve components of the U.S. Air Force, with tours across North Africa and the Middle East, including Iraq, where he earned the Bronze Star in 2003. He is the author of a book exploring Sunni-Shi’a relations in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, entitled Sectarian Politics in the Gulf: From the Iraq War to the Arab Uprisings. His most recent Carnegie publications include U.S.-Arab Counterterrorism Cooperation in a Region Ripe for Extremism with Michele Dunne (2014), Ending Libya’s Civil War: Reconciling Politics, Rebuilding Security (2014), and A New U.S. Approach to Gulf Security (2014).

Ambassador Bisa Williams (ret) is co-Founder and Managing Director of Williams Strategy Advisors, LLC (WSA), a problem-solving, business and foreign affairs advisory consulting firm. For the last 2 years, she has also led The Carter Center’s effort as Independent Observer of implementation of the Peace Agreement in Mali.  Before forming WSA, Ambassador Williams was a career member of the Foreign Service of the U.S. Department of State. During her 30+ years in the Foreign Service, she served tours in Guinea (Conakry), Panama, Mauritius, France, the US Mission to the UN (NY), Washington, DC, including two years at the National Security Council of The White House, and Niger. As Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Ambassador Williams led the US delegation to talks in Havana, Cuba, breaking a seven year hiatus of high level direct discussions. Her accomplishments were recognized in LeoGrande/Kornbluh book Back Channel to Cuba. She was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2010 as Ambassador to Niger where she served for 3 years. Following her tour as Ambassador, she was named Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of African Affairs, supporting US economic policy goals in sub-Saharan Africa and bilateral policy in the West Africa region. Ambassador Williams retired from the Foreign Service in 2015.  She speaks French, Spanish, and Portuguese and is the recipient of numerous Superior and Meritorious Honor Awards from the Department of State. She holds a Master of Science degree in National Security Strategy from the National War College of the National Defense University in Washington, DC and a Master of Arts degree in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Andrew Yeo is Associate Professor of Politics and Director of Asian Studies at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Asia’s Regional Architecture: Alliances and Institutions in the Pacific Century (Stanford University Press, 2019) and author or co-editor of three other books: North Korean Human Rights: Activists and Networks (Cambridge University Press 2018); Activists, Alliances, and Anti-U.S. Base Protests (Cambridge University Press 2011); and Living in an Age of Mistrust: An Interdisciplinary Study of Declining Trust in Contemporary Society and Politics and How to get it Back (Routledge Press 2017). His research and teaching interests include international relations theory, East Asian regionalism, narratives and discourse, the formation of beliefs, ideas, and worldviews, civil society, social and transnational movements, U.S. grand strategy and global force posture, Korean politics, and North Korea. Dr. Yeo’s scholarly publications have appeared in International Studies Quarterly, European Journal of International Relations, Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Politics, Journal of East Asian Studies, and International Relations of the Asia-Pacific among others. As part of the Bridging the Gap network, Dr. Yeo is a firm believer in connecting academic theory with policy relevant research. He is a former term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the National Committee on North Korea. He contributes to the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog, and has appeared or been quoted in a variety of media outlets including MSNBC, Channel News Asia, CBS radio, Voice of America, RTHK-Hong Kong, The New York Times Magazine, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Diplomat, and Foreign Affairs.