The Islamic Jihad Organization, was a Lebanese Shia militia known for its activities in the 1980s during the Lebanese Civil War. They demanded the departure of all Americans from Lebanon and took responsibility for a number of kidnappings, assassinations, and bombings of embassies and peacekeeping troops which killed several hundred people. Their deadliest attacks were in 1983, when they carried out the bombing of the barracks of French and U.S. MNF peacekeeping troops, and that of the United States embassy in Beirut. Adam Shatz described Islamic Jihad as "a precursor to Hezbollah, which did not yet officially exist" at the time of the bombing it took credit for.
Abdolkarim SoroushPersian pronunciation:[æbdolkæriːmsoruːʃ]), born Hossein Haj Faraj Dabbagh, is an Iranian Islamic thinker, reformer, Rumi scholar, public intellectual, and a former professor of philosophy at the University of Tehran and Imam Khomeini International University. He is arguably the most influential figure in the religious intellectual movement of Iran. Soroush is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. He was also affiliated with other institutions, including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, the Leiden-based International Institute as a visiting professor for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. He was named by Time magazine as one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2005, and by Prospect magazine as one of the most influential intellectuals in the world in 2008. Soroush's ideas, founded on relativism, prompted both supporters and critics to compare his role in reforming Islam to that of Martin Luther in reforming Christianity.
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.
Fred M. Kaplan is an American author and journalist. His weekly "War Stories" column for Slate magazine covers international relations and U.S. foreign policy.
James Mann is a Washington-based journalist and author. He has written a series of non-fiction books, including three about America's relationship with China and four more about American foreign policy. His group biography about George W. Bush's war cabinet, Rise of The Vulcans, was a New York Times best-seller. As a newspaper journalist, he worked for more than two decades for the Los Angeles Times, where he served as Supreme Court correspondent, Beijing bureau chief, and foreign-policy columnist. Earlier in his career, he worked at The Washington Post, where he took part in the newspaper's Watergate coverage.
Ze'ev Schiff was an Israeli journalist and military correspondent for Haaretz.
John Paul Wallach, born in New York City, was an American journalist, and author. He served as foreign editor and diplomatic correspondent for Hearst newspapers for nearly 30-years, traveling to more than 70 countries with five different Presidents, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan.
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".
Mohsen Mirdamadi is an Iranian academic and politician. He is the Deputy Secretary General of "Ettehad-e Mellat", the largest pro-reform political party in Iran. After the 2009 Iranian Presidential Elections, he was sentenced to and put to 6 years of prison, among other leaders of reformist party. Previously, he was elected as a member of the Parliament of Iran from 2000 until 2004, during which time he chaired the parliament's Commission of National Security and Foreign Policy. He received his PhD from Cambridge University in 1997 in Foreign Relations. He has served in various political roles since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, including serving as the governor of Khuzestan Province in the last years of the Iran-Iraq war. He was among the organizers of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis.
Brenda Shaffer is an American scholar who holds positions as Fellow with the Atlantic Council and professor at University of Haifa. Shaffer was the former research director of the Caspian Studies Program at Harvard Kennedy School and past president of the Foreign Policy Section of the American Political Science Association. She specializes on energy in international relations and energy policy in the Caspian region and has written or edited several books of these topics, including "Energy Politics" and "Beyond the Resource Curse." Shaffer has also written a number of books on the topic of identity and culture in the Caucasus including explorations of Azeri literature and culture. She has been accused of lobbying for Azerbaijan and failing to disclose conflicts of interest. According to the 2019 book Lobbying in the European Union: Strategies, Dynamics and Trends, published by Springer: "research shows that her [Shaffer's] entire career has benefitted from financial support from sources tied to Azerbaijan's leadership".
Haleh Esfandiari is an Iranian-American academic and former Director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. Her areas of expertise include Middle Eastern women's issues, contemporary Iranian intellectual currents and politics, and democratic developments in the Middle East. She was detained in solitary confinement at Evin Prison in Tehran, Iran for more than 110 days from May 8 to August 21, 2007.
The 1983 Kuwait bombings were attacks on six key foreign and Kuwaiti installations on 12 December 1983, two months after the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing. The 90-minute coordinated attack on two embassies, the country's main airport, and petro-chemical plant was more notable for the damage it was intended to cause than what was actually destroyed. What might have been "the worst terrorist episode of the twentieth century in the Middle East" killed only six people because of the bombs' faulty rigging.
Trita Parsi is the co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, as well as the founder and former president of the National Iranian American Council. He regularly writes articles and appears on TV to comment on foreign policy and is the author of Treacherous Alliance, A Single Roll of the Dice and Losing an Enemy.
Karen DeYoung is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, and is the associate editor for The Washington Post.
David Makovsky is the Ziegler distinguished fellow and director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy Project on the Middle East Peace Process.
Sanam Naraghi Anderlini, MBE is a British-Iranian author and Founder and Executive Director of the International Civil Society Action Network (ICAN). She has been a peace strategist working on conflicts, crises and violent extremism and as a consultant to the United Nations on the subject of women and conflict. Naraghi Anderlini joined LSE as Director of the Centre for Women, Peace and Security in December 2019.
Michael "Mickey" Bergman is the Vice President and Executive Director of the Richardson Center for Global Engagement. He also teaches as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service, where his graduate level courses focus on the art of emotional intelligence in International Relations and negotiations. He has pioneered the field of Fringe Diplomacy, an area of global engagement that connects people in arenas typically left void by governments and NGOs. Mickey Bergman has become known as an expert in the fields of Cuba, North Korea, and Myanmar. Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, alongside Former Governor Bill Richardson; Mickey has led his team at the Richardson Center to facilitate the release of more political prisoners than any other organization, including American Student, Otto Warmbier, from North Korea, and Princeton student, Xiyue Wang, from Iran. Mickey creates new political capital by leading Professional Exchange Programs to frontier countries such as North Korea, Myanmar, Cuba, Lebanon, and others. He has worked as Executive Director of the Global Alliances Program at the Aspen Institute. He is also the Founder and President of the Solel Strategic Group (SSG). Mickey has published numerous articles, interviews, and opinion pieces in the New York Times, Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, Boston Globe, Foreign Policy Online, and Huffington Post. Mickey also has been featured as a subject matter expert for television interviews on CNN, ABC, CBS, Fox News, I24news, Global News, and ABC News Australia.
Dalia Dassa Kaye is an American academic. She serves as the Director of the Center for Middle East Public Policy at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California.
Dalia Ziada is an Egyptian writer. She is the author of "The Curious Case of the Three-Legged Wolf - Egypt: Military, Islamism, and Liberal Democracy" and other internationally acclaimed non-fiction books on Middle East politics. She currently works as the Chairperson of the Liberal Democracy Institute, and executive director of MEEM Center for Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean Studies.
Hugh David Scott Greenway is an American journalist who has worked as a foreign affairs correspondent for Time Life, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. Greenway has covered conflicts in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iraq, Pakistan, Burma, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Bosnia, and Croatia. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, the Columbia Journalism Review, and la Repubblica. Greenway is currently a columnist for Foreign Affairs and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
