The Cato Institute is an American libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C. It was founded in 1977 by Ed Crane, Murray Rothbard, and Charles Koch, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Koch Industries. Cato was established to focus on public advocacy, media exposure and societal influence.
Thomas Gordon Palmer is an American libertarian author and theorist, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and Vice President for International Programs at the Atlas Network.
Douglas Bandow is an American political writer working as a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. In 2005, Bandow was forced to resign from the Cato Institute after it was revealed that for over ten years, he accepted payments in exchange for publishing articles favorable to various clients. Bandow referred to the activities as "a lapse of judgment" and said that he accepted payments for "between 12 and 24 articles," each article costing approximately $2,000. Bandow was subsequently allowed to return to the Cato Institute.
Shibley Telhami is an American professor in the department of government and politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a nonresident senior fellow of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy is a pro-Israel American think tank based in Washington, D.C., focused on the foreign policy of the United States in the Near East.
The School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) is the international affairs and public policy school of Columbia University, a private Ivy League university located in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, New York City. SIPA offers Master of International Affairs (MIA) and Master of Public Administration (MPA) degrees in a range of fields, as well as the Executive MPA and PhD program in Sustainable Development.
Martin Sean Indyk is an American diplomat and foreign relations analyst with expertise in the Middle East.
Rashid Ismail Khalidi is a Palestinian-American historian of the Middle East and the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. He served as editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies from 2002 until 2020, when he became co-editor with Sherene Seikaly.
Vali Reza Nasr is an Iranian-American academic and author, specializing in the Middle East and the Islamic world. He is Majid Khaddouri Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C. He served as the eighth dean of the school from 2012 to 2019. Nasr is also a Non-Resident Fellow in South Asia at Atlantic Council and is described by The Economist as "a leading world authority on Shia Islam".
Philip Mattar is a Palestinian American historian. Born in Jerusalem, He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in Middle Eastern history and has taught history at Yale University, Georgetown University and the City College of New York. Mattar was a Fulbright scholar, a Fellow at The Woodrow Wilson Center, and a Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace. He is the President of the Palestinian American Research Center in Washington D.C. whose mission is "To improve scholarship about Palestinian affairs, expand the pool of experts knowledgeable about the Palestinians, and strengthen linkages among Palestinian, American, and foreign research institutions and scholars." He also served as executive director of the Institute for Palestine Studies from 1984 to 2001.
Bruce R. Hoffman is an American political analyst. He specializes in the study of terrorism, counter-terrorism, insurgency, and counter-insurgency. Hoffman serves as the Shelby Cullom and Kathryn W. Davis Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security on the Council on Foreign Relations, and is a professor at the School of Foreign Service of Georgetown University. In addition, he is the Professor Emeritus and Honorary Professor of Terrorism Studies at the University of St Andrews, and is the George H. Gilmore Senior Fellow at the U.S. Military Academy's Combating Terrorism Center.
David Makovsky is the Ziegler distinguished fellow and director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy Project on the Middle East Peace Process.
Steven Simon is a former United States National Security Council senior director for the Middle East and North Africa. He also previously served as the Executive Director IISS-US and Corresponding Director IISS-Middle East and as a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute based in Washington, D.C. He was Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies, at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was a Spring 2008 Berlin Prize Fellow. Steven Simon is now a visiting professor at Colby College in Maine.
Marc Lynch is a Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University, where he is also director of both the Institute for Middle East Studies and the Middle East Studies Program.
Earl Cedric Ravenal was an American foreign policy analyst, academic, and writer. He served as a distinguished senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute and professor emeritus of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.
Wikistrat Inc. is a geostrategic analysis and business consultancy founded in Israel in 2010 by Joel Zamel and Daniel Green and headquartered in the United States. It describes itself as the world's first crowdsourced consultancy leveraging a global network of over 2,000 subject-matter experts. 74 percent of the firm’s revenue came from clients that were foreign governments such as United Arab Emirates and United States Government after which Deloitte is the biggest contributor.
Ariel Cohen is a political scientist focusing on political risk, international security and energy policy, and the rule of law. Cohen currently serves as the Managing Director of the Energy, Growth, and Security Program] (EGS) at the International Tax and Investment Center (ITIC), an independent, nonprofit research and education organization founded in 1993 to promote tax reform and public-private initiatives to improve the investment climate in transition and developing economies.
Shadi Hamid is an American author and political scientist, who is currently a columnist and member of the Editorial Board at The Washington Post. Previously, he was a longtime senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He also holds the position of research professor of Islamic studies at Fuller Seminary. This appointment is the first time a Muslim scholar has been hired in the school's history. He has been called a "prominent thinker on religion and politics" in the New York Times and was named as one of "The world's top 50 thinkers" in 2019 by Prospect Magazine. He is known for coining the phrase "Islamic exceptionalism" to describe Islam's resistance to secularization and outsized role in public life. The phrase has come under some criticism.
Frederic Wehrey is an American scholar of Middle East affairs, expert on Libyan and Gulf politics, and Senior Fellow at the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Wehrey earned a PhD in international relations from Oxford University.
Hamid Akın Ünver is an assistant professor of international relations at Kadir Has University, specializing in energy politics, conflict psychology and radicalization sociology. He also studies discourse theory, regional security complex theory and psychoanalytic approaches to decision-making and teaches courses on the politics of the Middle East, diplomatic history, energy security and security theory.
