Andrea Armstrong joined the Loyola University New Orleans College of Law faculty in 2010. Her research and teaching interests include criminal procedure, criminal law, civil rights, domestic and international human rights, law and poverty, and race and the law. Professor Armstrong is a graduate of Yale Law School and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, where she completed her M.P.A. in international relations.
Prior to law school, Armstrong researched regional conflict dynamics at the Center on International Cooperation at NYU and transitional justice strategies at the International Center for Transitional Justice. She has also examined conflict prevention for the United Nations Department of Political Affairs; the denial of citizenship in Central Asia and the Caucasus for the Commission on Human Security; and human rights and refugee protection for the International Rescue Committee. She has also taught policy modules on democratization at the Junior Summer Institute at Princeton University.
Ashraf Ghani, chairman of the Institute for State Effectiveness, was named among the twenty most influential global thinkers of 2009 and 2010 for his work on fragile states. As adviser to the UN secretary-general, he advised on the Bonn Agreement for Afghanistan, and then as Afghanistan’s finance minister between 2002 and 2004, he is credited with a series of successful reforms in Afghanistan, including reform of the treasury, customs, budget, and the currency. He prepared Afghanistan’s first National Development Framework and Securing Afghanistan’s Future, a $28 billion reconstruction program for the country. In 2010, he developed and facilitated the successful Kabul Conference and Process to build internal consensus and external alignment on priorities in Afghanistan. Ghani was named best finance minister in Asia by Emerging Markets, a publication of Euromoney Institutional Investor plc, in 2003 and was previously nominated for the posts of UN secretary-general and the president of the World Bank.
Trained in political science and anthropology at the American University of Beirut and Columbia University. Ghani served on the faculty at Johns Hopkins from 1983 to 1991 and has taught at Kabul University, Aarhus University, and Berkeley. He was chief anthropologist at the World Bank from 1991 to 2001, working on large-scale development and institutional projects in East Asia, South Asia, and Russia, and global issues of strategy and development. Ghani is involved on the advisory boards for a number of activities supporting the reform of global institutions, including the Commission on the UN High-Level Panel on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, the UN Democracy Fund, the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, IDEA, the Brookings Institution’s project on global insecurity, the Atlantic Council, and the World Justice Project of the American Bar Association. He is a former chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Fragile States and a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is author (with Clare Lockhart) of Fixing Failed States (2008) and a Window to a Just Order (in Pushtu and Dari, 2009).
Humayun Hamidzada is an independent scholar and consultant based in Toronto, Canada. He served as Afghanistan’s deputy minister of finance for policy between 2009 and 2011. Previously, Hamidzada served the president of Afghanistan as his chief spokesman and director of communications from 2007 to late 2009.
Prior to his period of service in the Presidential Palace, Hamidzada served as founding director of the Center for Policy and Human Development (CPHD), an independent policy research institute at Kabul University. Hamidzada received his master’s degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Hamidzada has previously worked in senior research and management roles for the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in New York, and the United Nations Development Program in Kandahar, Kabul and Islamabad.
Bruce Jones is director and senior fellow of the NYU Center on International Cooperation, and senior fellow and director of the Managing Global Order Program at the Brookings Institution. He has served as senior external advisor for the World Bank’s World Development Report 2011 on Conflict, Security, and Development; as a member of the Secretary-General’s Senior Advisory Group to guide the Review of International Civilian Capacities (2010–11); as the lead scholar on the International Task Force on Global Public Goods (2007); and as deputy research director for the UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change (2004–05). He is coauthor with Carlos Pascual and Stephen Stedman of Power and Responsibility: Building International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats (2009); coeditor with Shepard Forman of Cooperating for Peace and Security (2009); author of Peacemaking in Rwanda: The Dynamics of Failures; series editor of the Annual Review of Global Peace Operations and author of several book chapters and journal articles on U.S. strategy, global order, the Middle East, peace keeping, postconflict peace building, and strategic coordination. He is consulting professor at Stanford University, adjunct faculty at the NYU Wagner School of Public Service, and professor by courtesy at the NYU Department of Politics.
William Maley is professor and director of the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy at the Australian National University. He is a member of the Order of Australia (AM) and a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (FASSA). He is author of Rescuing Afghanistan (2006) and The Afghanistan Wars (2002, 2009); coauthor of Regime Change in Afghanistan: Foreign Intervention and the Politics of Legitimacy (1991) and Political Order in Post-Communist Afghanistan (1992); and editor of Fundamentalism Reborn? Afghanistan and the Taliban (1998, 2001).
Helena Malikyar is an independent researcher and writer based in Kabul. Since 2001, she has worked on numerous governance-related projects with the UN and USAID, as well as the Center on International Cooperation’s Afghanistan Regional Project. She was an aide to the former Afghan king, Mohammad Zahir Shah, in Rome. Malikyar holds an M.A. from New York University with concentration on the history of state building in Afghanistan.
Ahmed Rashid is a Pakistani journalist based in Lahore, who has covered Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia for a variety of publications since 1979. He is the author of the best selling Taliban, which in April 2010 was reissued on its tenth anniversary with an updated version. His later book is Descent into Chaos: The US and the Disaster in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia. His other books include Jihad (2002) and The Resurgence of Central Asia (1994). His fifth and latest book is Pakistan on the Brink: The Future of America, Pakistan and Afghanistan. He writes for the Financial Times, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Spain’s El Mundo, BBC Online, and Pakistani publications.
In 2001, he won the Nisar Osmani Courage in Journalism Award, given by the Human Rights Society of Pakistan. In 2008 he won Spain’s prestigious Casa Asia prize for contributing most about Asia to the Spanish people. The following year he was presented with the prize for best columnist in the Spanish press by King Juan Carlos at a dinner honoring him. In December 2009 he was appointed a member of the board of New York’s Committee to Protect Journalists, while Foreign Policy magazine chose him as one of the world’s most important 100 Global Thinkers in 2009 and 2010. He has also served on the board of advisers for the International Committee of the Red Cross for five years. His books have won numerous prizes.
Olivier Roy is presently professor at the European University Institute (Florence); he heads the Mediterranean program at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and the ReligioWest research project (funded by the European Research Council). He has been a senior researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (since 1985), professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (since 2003), and visiting professor at Berkeley University (2008–09). He headed the OSCE’s Mission for Tajikistan (1993–94) and was a consultant for the UN Office of the Coordinator for Afghanistan (1988). His fields of study include Afghanistan, political Islam, Middle East, Islam in the West, and comparative religions. Roy received an Agrégation de Philosophie and a Ph.D. in political science. He is the author of The Failure of Political Islam (1994), Globalized Islam (2004), and more recently Holy Ignorance (2010).
Jake Sherman is the Afghanistan/Pakistan regional team leader for the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Office of Transition Initiatives, a position he has held since May 2012. Previously, he held various positions at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, most recently as deputy director for conflict programs. At CIC, Sherman’s research focused on United Nations peace keeping and preventive diplomacy, as well as on counternarcotics and private security companies in Afghanistan. From 2003 to 2005, Sherman was a political officer for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.
Abubakar Siddique is a senior correspondent covering Afghanistan and Pakistan for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Central Newsroom. He has spent the past decade researching and writing about security, political, humanitarian, and cultural issues in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Pashtun heartland along the border region where he was born. He is writing a book on the future of extremism in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Siddique has contributed to eurasianet.org, Pakistan’s Friday Times and Newsline magazines, as well as the Central European Journal of International and Security Studies, the National Defense University’s Global Strategic Assessment 2009, and the Barcelona Center for International Affairs. He has also contributed to edited volumes on stabilization and regional studies. He holds master’s degrees in journalism and anthropology. He was a Fulbright Scholar at New York University from 2005 to 2006, and while at NYU he also worked at the Center on International Cooperation. He speaks English, Pashto, Urdu, and several other languages of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Abby Stoddard is a partner with the independent research group Humanitarian Outcomes and a senior program advisor for humanitarian affairs at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation. Her past professional experience includes ten years in program positions with international humanitarian organizations, and she currently serves as board president for Doctors of the World (Médecins du Monde USA). She is the author of Humanitarian Alert: NGO Information and Its Impact on US Foreign Policy (2006), along with numerous articles and book chapters on humanitarian action, nongovernmental organizations, and the U.S. foreign aid architecture. She holds a Ph.D. in politics from New York University and a master’s in international affairs from Columbia University.