Speakers

Photo credit:
Courtesy of Rosa Brooks

Rosa Brooks is a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. Brooks also is an adjunct scholar at West Point’s Modern War Institute and a senior fellow in the ASU/New America Future of War Program. She is a cofounder of the popular foreign policy podcast, Deep State Radio. From 2009 to 2011, Brooks served as counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. From 2012 to 2017, she was a columnist and contributing editor at Foreign Policy; and from 2005 to 2009, Brooks was a weekly op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Her most recent book is How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything (Simon and Schuster, 2016).

Photo credit:
Courtesy of Scott Shapiro

Scott Shapiro is Charles F. Southmayd Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at Yale Law School. His areas of interest include jurisprudence, international law, constitutional law, criminal law, and cybersecurity. He is the author of Legality (2011), The Internationalists (2017) with Oona Hathaway, and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law (2002) with Jules Coleman. He earned BA and PhD degrees in philosophy from Columbia University and a JD from Yale Law School. He is an editor of Legal Theory and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He also is the founder of the Documentary Film clinic, which provides legal services to independent documentary filmmakers. His next book, entitled Insecurity, details the history and technology of Internet hacking.

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Courtesy of Trita Parsi

Trita Parsi is an award-winning author and the 2010 recipient of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. He is the founder and president of the National Iranian American Council and an expert on US-Iranian relations, Iranian foreign politics, and the geopolitics of the Middle East. He is the author of three books on US-Iran relations, including Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy (Yale University Press, 2017), which reveals the behind-the-scenes story to the historic nuclear deal with Iran. Parsi advised the Obama White House on the nuclear talks. His articles on Middle East affairs have been published in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, Jane’s Intelligence Review, The Nation, the American Conservative, the Jerusalem Post, The Forward, and others. He is a frequent guest on CNN, PBS’s Newshour, NPR, the BBC, and Al Jazeera.

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Courtesy of Ayesha Siddiqa

Ayesha Siddiqa is a research associate with the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy (CISD) at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She has a PhD in war studies from King’s College, London, and is the author of two books: Pakistan’s Arms Procurement and Military Buildup, 1979-99, and Military Inc; Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy. She is currently working on a book on militancy and extremism in South Asia and its links with the Middle East. She was the first Pakistan fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, a Ford Fellow, a senior research fellow at Sandia National Laboratories, and a Charles Wallace Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford. Siddiqa has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University.

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Courtesy of Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley

Ambassador Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley has been an influential figure in U.S. foreign policy throughout her 30-year career in international diplomacy. Among her many senior roles in world affairs, Abercrombie-Winstanley was the longest-serving U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Malta. She also expanded our counterterrorism partners and programs as deputy coordinator for counterterrorism. In another role as the Secretary of State’s special assistant for the Middle East and Africa, she monitored the election in the Gaza Strip and was the first ever woman to lead a diplomatic mission in Saudi Arabia.

Photo credit:
Courtesy of Kathleen Stephens

U.S. Ambassador (ret.) Kathleen Stephens was the ambassador to the Republic of Korea from 2008 to 2011. Other overseas assignments included postings to China, former Yugoslavia, Portugal, Northern Ireland. She is currently the president and CEO of the Korea Economic Institute of America since September 2018, based in Washington, D.C.

Photo credit:
Courtesy of Jeffrey Wasserstrom

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine. His recent books include, as coauthor, the updated third edition of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, 2018), and, as author, Eight Juxtapositions: China through Imperfect Analogies from Mark Twain to Manchukuo (Penguin 2016). In addition to writing for academic journals, he has contributed to many general interest venues, including the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, the Nation, and the Atlantic. He is an academic editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books’s “China Channel” and serves on the editorial board of Dissent Magazine.

Photo credit:
Courtesy of Sheila A. Smith

Sheila A. Smith a senior fellow for Japan Studies, Council on Foreign Relations. She is the author of Intimate Rivals: Japanese Domestic Politics and a Rising China, and serves as vice chair of the U.S. advisors to the U.S.-Japan Conference on Cultural and Educational Interchange (CULCON). She teaches at the Department of Asian Studies of Georgetown University.

Photo credit:
Courtesy of Francine Jácome

Francine Jácome is the executive director of the Venezuelan Institute for Social and Political Studies (INVESP). She has served as a consultant for OAS, UNITAR, UNESCO, Friedrich Ebert Foundation, International Development Research Centre (IDRC-Canada), Open Society Institute (OSI), Canadian Agency for International Development, the European Union, and Partners Global.

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Courtesy of Sonja Wolf

Sonja Wolf is a CONACYT Research Fellow at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE) in Mexico. She is the author of Mano Dura: The Politics of Gang Control in El Salvador. Her research focuses on violence, street gangs, migration, and security policies, particularly in Central America.

Photo credit:
Courtesy of Jorge Heine

Jorge Heine was Chile’s ambassador to China, India, and South Africa, and a former cabinet minister in the Chilean government. He is currently a public policy fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. He has published 15 books and some 100 journal articles, and has written for the New York Times and the Washington Post.