Neil Kent, Professor and Fellow, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, Author of Crimea: A History, St. Petersburg: A Cultural Guide, A Concise History of the Russian Orthodox Church, and many other books.

Clément Chevalier is an officer in the French army and serves at the École militaire de Paris. Occupying the position of head of international relations and management sciences, Clément Chevalier has two masters degrees, in history and management, and is completing a doctorate in law. He has lectured on military tactics in the early modern era and written historical and academic works. In 2021, he founded a cultural association dedicated to performing Baroque music in historic and heritage sites.

Harry Saul Markham, a 25-year-old recent graduate of University College London (UCL), takes a keen interest in addressing threats to democracy, social cohesion, and the rights of minorities. In his roles as a Junior Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy and an Advisory Board member of Academics for Academic Freedom, he has been involved in media interviews, discussions with policymakers, journalists, and other prominent public figures in advancing centrist, but bold approaches, to some of the major social issues facing Western Europe. As the former Head of Research and Policy at the Association of British Muslims, the oldest Muslim organization in the UK, Markham supported not only important counter-extremism initiatives, but also novel efforts to renew Jewish-Muslim relations.

William Franke is a philosopher of the humanities and professor of comparative literature at Vanderbilt University. He has been professor of philosophy at University of Macao; Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Intercultural Theology at University of Salzburg; Alexander von Humboldt Foundation research fellow in Berlin; and Francesco de Dombrowski Visiting Professor at Harvard University’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence. In 2021 he became Professor Honoris Causa of the Agora Hermeneutica. His apophatic philosophy is conceived and expounded in On What Cannot Be Said (2007) and A Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014). It is extended into a comparative philosophy of culture in Apophatic Paths from Europe to China: Regions Without Borders (2018) and applied to address current controversies in education and society in On the Universality of What Is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking (2020). His most recent Pandemics and Apocalypse in World Literature: The Hope for Planetary Salvation (2025) plies his apophatic philosophy to illuminate issues of urgent public purport. He lectures and leads seminars on his ideas in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish on five continents.

Edward Dutton is Honorary Professor of Evolutionary Psychology of Business at Asbiro University, in Łódź, Poland, Honorary Professor at the Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Research Associate in the Deanship of Scientific Research at Tabuk University, Saudi Arabia.

Shubh Mathur is an independent scholar specializing in anthropology, history, and international affairs. She has published extensively on human rights, religious nationalism, state violence and sovereignty, including three books: The Everyday Life of Hindu Nationalism: An Ethnographic Account, The Human Toll of the Kashmir Conflict: Grief and Courage in a South Asian Borderland and (co-edited with Mirza Saaib Bég), and Life, Politics, and Resistance in Kashmir after 2019: A Multidisciplinary Understanding of the Conflict. Mathur’s current interests include environmental ethics and animal rights. She believes that the notion of sovereignty as unchecked power links political violence with environmental devastation, and that the way we treat the natural world is a reflection of how we treat each other.

Zoë I. Levornik is an expert in the field of nuclear security and policy, international relations theory and constructivism. She holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the University of Haifa and also studied at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany. Dr. Levornik was a Stanton Nuclear Security Research Fellow at MIT’s Security Studies Program and a Research Fellow at the National Security Study Center (NSSC) at the University of Haifa. Dr. Levornik is also an analyst and political consultant.

Confidence Mbang is a legal practitioner based in Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory of Nigeria. He is legal head of the firm Confidence Mbang Legal (CML) and founder of Morelaw, a legal services advisory in multiple aspects of law. A constitutional law and human rights enthusiast, Mr. Mbang is an associate of the Institute of Chartered Mediators and Conciliators (ICMC) and an appointee to the Special Envoy for West Africa with the International Human Rights Protection Service in the United States. Mr. Mbang has represented young people of the Abi/Yakurr Federal Constituency at the Niger Delta Youth Parliament (NDYP). He is an awardee of the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies (CSLS), an Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA) Ranger, and a member of the Citizens’ Liberties Committee (CLC) of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA).

“Brian Kaller is a journalist with the soul of a cultural anthropologist. He closely observed the daily life of his adopted country, and took the time to do what so few younger men these days bother to do: talk to the old people, and hear their stories.”
–Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy Cons, The Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies

Brian Kaller worked as a reporter and editor in the United States before moving to rural Ireland for two decades. He writes a weekly newspaper column on sustainable living, and has also written for The American Conservative, First Things, Resilience, Mother Earth News and Quillette. He has appeared on Irish television and his work has been featured on the popular BBC television series QI. He recently returned to his native Missouri.

Kakhaber Kalichava received his Ph.D. from Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University in 2019, with a focus on recent conflicts in Georgia and their broader international implications. Dr. Kalichava completed an MA thesis examining the 2008 Russo-Georgian war, “The Russo-Georgian War of 2008 in Georgian and English-Language Scholarship: A Survey of Historical, Ethnical, Political, and Legal Aspects of the Conflict,” which was published in 2016. Since 2013, Dr. Kalichava has been a contributing member of the editorial team of the popular Georgian historical magazine Istoriani. He also lectures at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, where he teaches graduate courses, and teaches history and global politics at New School International School of Georgia. A past research scholar of the Erasmus Mundus program in Poland, he has also developed an English-language course designed for the program’s exchange students. Dr. Kalichava also serves as an international examiner for history, global politics, and the extended essay components of the international baccalaureate curriculum.

Dr. John A. Gentry teaches at the School of Defense and Strategic Studies at Missouri State University. For twelve years, he was an intelligence analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, where he mainly worked on economic issues associated with the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries. For two of those years, he was senior analyst on the staff of the National Intelligence Officer for Warning. Dr. Gentry is a retired U.S. Army Reserve officer, with most assignments in special operations and intelligence arenas. Previously, he taught at Georgetown University, Columbia University, and the National Intelligence University. He writes regularly on intelligence and security issues. He is the author of Neutering the CIA: Why US Intelligence Versus Trump Has Long-Term Consequences (2023) and about 40 articles and book chapters on intelligence topics. He has an economics background and received his Ph.D. in political science from George Washington University. Follow him at @gentry_johna.