Thomas Briggs is the Director of Environmental Health and Safety at the University of Central Florida. Previously, Mr. Briggs has worked at CENTCOM as a contract counter-terrorism analyst and at the City University of New York as Director of Environmental Health and Safety. Additionally, he has held the positions of Director of Safety at Madison Square Garden and Safety Coordinator at the American Museum of Natural History. ISC (EXW/FMF) Briggs has deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Michael Evans is the General Sir Francis Hassett Chair of Military Studies at the Australian Defence College, Canberra and a professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University, Melbourne. He is a former Head of the Australian Army's principal research organisation, the Land Warfare Studies Centre at the Royal Military College, Duntroon. Professor Evans was the lead author of the Australian Army's Land Warfare Doctrine, LWD 3-0-1, Counterinsurgency manual published in December 2009.
Christine Fair is an assistant professor in the Security Studies Program, Georgetown University and the author of Fighting to the End: How the Pakistan Army Wages War forthcoming in 2014 by Oxford University Press.
Yoav Gortzak is associate professor of International Relations in the School of Security and Global Studies at American Military University.
Celeste Ward Gventer was the Political Advisor to the Multi-National Corps-Iraq Commander in 2006; she is a former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense; and is co-editor of The New Counterinsurgency Era in Critical Perspective, with David Martin Jones, and M.L.R. Smith (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
James Hasík is a senior fellow in the Brent Scowcroft Center for International Security at the Atlantic Council. Concurrently, he is a William Powers Doctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a PhD student in the Lyndon B. Johnson of Public Affairs. He holds an MBA from the University of Chicago and a BA from Duke University.
Alice Hills joined Durham University as professor of conflict studies in 2013. She is currently Research Director in the School of Government. Before joining Durham she was professor of conflict and security at the University of Leeds, where she acted as Research Director and Unit of Assessment leader for POLIS. Prior to that she taught defence studies at the UK's Joint Services Command and Staff College where she specialised in urban operations and police-military relations. Alice's personal research agenda concerns police development, police-military relations, post-conflict policing and sub-state security.
Shivan Mahendrarajah is a final-year doctoral candidate in Islamic and Persian history at the University of Cambridge and is writing a dissertation on an influential Sufi community in Persia during the Mongol and Timurid periods (c.1250–1500). He earned a BBA in finance (1997). After a professional career, he returned to academics, earning an MA in Islamic studies at Columbia University, writing a thesis on the Taliban (2007). He studied Arabic and Persian in the United States before embarking on cultural immersion, field research, and language study in Morocco, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. He is from Houston, Texas.
Douglas Porch is Distinguished Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, Calfornia. He is a specialist in military history and advises on national security affairs in both the US and internationally. His most recent book is Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War. A previous study The Path to Victory: The Mediterranean Theater in World War II received the Award for Excellence in US Army Historical Writing from The Army Historical Foundation.
Paul B Rich is joint editor of Small Wars and Insurgencies. He has taught at the universities of Bristol, Warwick and Melbourne and had written widely on warlordism, terrorism and insurgencies. He most recently co-edited (with Isabelle Duyvesteyn) The Routledge Handbook of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency (2012).
James A. Russell is an associate professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. The views in this article are his alone. This article is adapted from a book chapter that will appear in The Theory and Practice of Irregular Warfare: Warrior-Scholarship in Counter-Insurgency, edited by Andrew Mumford and Bruno C. Reis and published by Routledge. Publication date will be approx. December 2013.
David H. Ucko is an associate professor at the College of International Security Affairs, National Defense University, and an adjunct fellow at the Department of War Studies, King's College London. He is the author of Counterinsurgency in Crisis: Britain and the Challenges of Modern Warfare (Columbia, 2013) and of The New Counterinsurgency Era: Transforming the U.S. Military for Modern Wars (Georgetown, 2009).