Carter Malkasian was the Special Assistant for Strategy to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Joseph Dunford from 2015 to 2019. He has extensive experience working in Afghanistan through multiple deployments throughout the country. The highlight of his work is the nearly two years he spent in Garmser district, Helmand province, Afghanistan, as a State Department political officer and the district stabilization team leader. He is the author of War Comes to Garmser: Thirty Years of Conflict on the Afghan Frontier(Oxford) and Illusions of Victory: The Anbar Awakening and the Rise of the Islamic State (Oxford). He has a Ph.D. in history from Oxford and is fluent in Pashto.

Janine di Giovanni is a Senior Fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. She is currently directing a project sponsored by the State Department documenting war crimes in Ukraine as well as consulting for UNICEF on gender and refugee issues. In 2019, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship for her research in the Middle East, and in 2020, she received the American Academy of Arts and Letters highest prize for non-fiction, the Blake Dodd, for her body of work spanning three decades. She is a Global Affairs columnist for Foreign Policy Magazine and The National, in Abu Dhabi. She is the author of nine books, the most recent, The Vanishing: Twilight of Christianity in the Middle East.

Di Giovanni has reported widely on war, conflict, and its aftermath for nearly 30 years in the Middle East, the Balkans, and Africa. She has investigated human rights abuses on four continents. She is the subject of two long-format documentaries, including the widely acclaimed 7 Days in Syria and Bearing Witness.

Janine is also non-resident International Security Fellow at the New America Foundation and an Associate Fellow at The Geneva Centre for Security Policy. She is a former Ochberg Fellow at Columbia University’s School of Journalism, given in recognition of her work with victims of war trauma.

Janice Stein is the Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management in the Department of Political Science and the Founding Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto; a Fellow of The Royal Society of Canada; prolific TV commentator; and Chair of the Research Advisory Board to the Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister; recent publications include Choosing to Cooperate: How States Avoid Loss, We All Lost the Cold War and Powder Keg in the Middle East: The Struggle for Gulf Security; lecturer on conflict management at the NATO Defence College in Rome and the Centre for National Security Studies, Ottawa; committee member of several influential American associations such as The United States Institute for Peace and National Academy of Science.