Distinguished Fellow

Jessica Tuchman Mathews is President of the Carnegie Endowment, a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing cooperation between nations and promoting active international engagement by the United States. Mathews served as director of the Council on Foreign Relation’s Washington program where she published her seminal 1997 Foreign Affairs article, “Power Shift,” chosen by the editors as one of the most influential in the journal’s 75 years. From 1977 to 1979, she served as director of the Office of Global Issues of the National Security Council, covering nuclear proliferation, conventional arms sales policy, chemical and biological warfare, and human rights. In 1993, she returned to government as deputy to the Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs

Adjunct Scholar

Malou Innocent is a Foreign Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute. She is a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and her primary research interests include Middle East and Persian Gulf security issues and U.S. foreign policy toward Pakistan, Afghanistan, and China. She has appeared as a guest analyst on CNN, BBC News, Fox News Channel, Al Jazeera, Voice of America, CNBC Asia, and Reuters and has published reviews and articles on national security and international affairs, including a piece on “The Endgame in Syria.”

Independent Journalist & Social Media Researcher

Anna Therese Day is an independent journalist and social media researcher, specializing in global civil society organizing, new media activism, and Middle East politics. Ms. Day has reported on the ground from Bahrain, Egypt, Israel & the Palestinian Territories, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Mexico, Syria, Turkey, and the United States, with extended time in Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Territories

Co-Founder and Executive Director

Zainab Al-Suwaij is the co-founder and executive director of the American Islamic Congress, a post-September 11th social activist organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that works to foster tolerance, promote civil society and civil rights, and mobilize a moderate voice in the American Muslim community.

Journalist

Lauren Wolfe is an award-winning journalist who has written for publications from The Atlantic to The Guardian. She is currently the director of WMC’s Women Under Siege, a project on sexualized violence in conflict originated by Gloria Steinem at the Women’s Media Center in New York. The project includes a live, crowd-sourced map of sexualized violence in Syria, WomenUnderSiegeSyria.crowdmap.com. She serves on the advisory committee of the Nobel Women’s Initiative’s International Campaign to Stop Rape & Gender Violence in Conflict.

Syria Team

Safa Sankari is the current president and co-founder of SAMS Michigan Foundation, a Non-profit, 501c3 dedicated to medical and humanitarian relief in the United States and Syria. She currently works with Women Under Siege on a crowd map project documenting reports of rape and sexual abuse in the current Syrian crisis.

Research Professor, Natural Sciences, State University of NY at Purchase

Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, PhD, is a founder of the Scientists Working Group on Biological and Chemical Weapons, established in 1989 and now affiliated with the Council for a Livable World’s Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. Dr. Rosenberg was a member of a panel of scientists that advised President Clinton, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Health on biological weapons issues in 1998; she was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Working Group on Biological Weapons; and she has spoken widely on the need for a technical WMD investigative body at the UN.

Richard G. Starmann Chair in Peace Studies

Dr. Lisa Schirch is the Alliance for Peacebuilding’s Director of Human Security in Washington. As part of a team at the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict and University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace, she trains military personnel in relating to civilians and aid agencies. A former Fulbright Fellow in East and West Africa, Schirch has worked in over 20 countries in conflict prevention and peacebuilding, most recently in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Fiji, and Lebanon. Schirch has written six books and numerous articles on conflict prevention and strategic peacebuilding, including the recent article Getting off the Wheel of Misfortune: US Policy and Syrian Suffering.

Professor of Practice

Dr. Nora Bensahel is Deputy Director of Studies and a Senior Fellow at The Center for a New American Security. She recently co-authored Hard Choices: Responsible Defense in an Age of Austerity, and Sustainable Pre-eminence: Reforming the U.S. Military at a Time of Strategic Change. Her other research interests include stability operations, counterinsurgency, civilian capacity for operations abroad, and coalition and alliance operations.

Co-Founder

Mouna Ghanem is the Coordinator of the Syrian Women’s Forum for Peace. She is also Vice- President of the Syrian political movement building the Syrian State. A senior gender advisor with extensive experience in the Arab region, Mouna worked for more than a decade as the Deputy Representative for UNFPA in Syria and chaired the Syrian Commission for Family Affairs. She also served as the Regional Director for the United Nation Fund for Women (UNIFEM) in Jordan, Amman.

Journalist, Delegate

Rama Jarmakani, 27 years old, is a journalist and a member of the Syrian Women’s Forum for Peace. She is also a member of the political movement Building the Syrian State. She is the creator of the "Bikaffy/ Enough" campaign, a group of Syrian “normal people and activists” who want to say "enough" for war in Syria.

Distinguished Fellow

Barbara Slavin is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's South Asia Center and Washington correspondent for Al-Monitor.com, a website devoted to news from and about the Middle East. The author of Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the US and the Twisted Path to Confrontation and is a regular commentator on US foreign policy and Iran. She has covered such key foreign policy issues as the US-led war on terrorism, policy toward "rogue" states, the Iran-Iraq war, and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Strategic Geopolitical Analyst and Political Military Consultant

Patricia (Tricia) DeGennaro is an adjunct professor at New York University’s Department of Politics where she teaches courses on international security, civilian and military relations and US foreign policy. She is a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute and a professional service provider and a subject matter expert on Afghanistan, the Middle East, the Arab Guff States, Pakistan and Iran for the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command. DeGennaro capitalizes on over fifteen years of experience as an international security and geopolitical consultant. She spends considerable time on field research in the Middle East, notably Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and the Occupied Territories. She is an expert commentator for CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera, Fox News, BBC, RT Television and various syndicated radio programs.

Foreign Affairs Columnist, Editorial Board Member

Trudy Rubin is the foreign affairs columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer; she has special expertise on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian issue, international terrorism, and U.S. foreign policy. Between 2003 and 2008 she made ten trips to Iraq and two to Iran and also wrote from Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, China and South Korea. In 2001, Rubin was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in commentary for her columns on the Middle East. She is also the winner of the 2008 Edward Weintal prize for international reporting.

TV Journalist & Filmmaker

Jehan S. Harney is an award-winning Egyptian-American TV journalist and filmmaker. Jehan is expert on the changing landscape of Egypt, as well as Arab-American issues and Islam in America. Her latest feature film, The Lost Dream, is about the ongoing Iraqi refugee crisis as a consequence of war.

Professor of Practice

Andrea Strimling Yodsampa, PhD, is a scholar and practitioner whose work focuses on inter-agency, civil-military, multinational, and government-NGO cooperation in peacebuilding, stabilization and reconstruction, and disaster relief. She is Principal Investigator on several US Government – sponsored research efforts on civil-military cooperation, strategic planning, and monitoring and evaluation. Dr. Strimling Yodsampa served for over a decade as a Commissioner with the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. She designed and led conflict management programs in Asia, Central and South America, and Eastern Europe.