Darrell Ezell is an expert on state/non-state actor relations, particularly between state actors engaging non-statecombatants in conflict zones.   He currently serves as a Visiting Assistant Professor of International Studies at Louisiana State University and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Political Science at Tulane University. 

Dr. Ezell received his Ph.D. in 2010 from the University of Birmingham (Birmingham, England), specializing in diplomacy, interfaith relations, and peacemaking, particularly in the Muslim and Arab world.  He also holds an M.A. in Theology and Ethics from Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University.

His research and teaching focus on asymmetrical conflict, counterterrorism, public diplomacy, and post-secularism.

He is the author of Beyond Cairo: U.S. Engagement with the Muslim World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), a study on U.S. public diplomacy efforts to restore trusted relations with the Muslim world since president Barack Obama’s 2009 ‘New Beginning’ address in Cairo, Egypt. His latest book chapter, “Enriching Post-secular Discourse in Faith Diplomacy” is featured in USC’s CPD Perspectives on Public Diplomacy.  Writing widely on globalization and intercultural cooperation, he has contributed to numerous media outlets and served as a contributing journalist at EA Worldview.

Dr. Ezell has worked with the U.S. Department of State (Office of Peacekeeping, Sanctions, and Counterterrorism) and William J. Clinton Foundation, undertaking high-level analysis on UN peacekeeping missions and cross-cultural communication projects in Africa and the Middle East. Prior to that, he has been active in grassroots peacemaking in New York City with the Interfaith Center of New York and in Chicago, IL with Interfaith Worker Justice. His human rights activism is featured in the documentary, Mississippi Chicken, highlighting his advocacy of workers’ rights for impoverished migrant workers in North America.

Patrice Brodeur is the holder of a Canada Research Chair on Islam, Pluralism, and Globalisation at the Faculty of Theology and the Sciences of Religions at the University of Montreal since 2005. Brodeur investigates the dynamics of power and multiple identities within intercultural, interreligious, intercivilizational, and interworldview dialogues, especially between Muslims and a variety of others. His Chair includes a  multidisciplinary research collective of over twenty researchers with funds from leading Canadian (SSHRC, CIC, DFAIT) and US (USIP) research and governmental agencies as well as international foundations and UN agencies (UNICEF, UNESCO, Alliance of Civilizations).

Brodeur studied at McGill University (BA, MA), Harvard University (AM, Ph.D.), Hebrew University in Jerusalem (2 years), and Faculty of Shari’ah at the University of Jordan (1 year). He spent a sabbatical year at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies as a Rockefeller Foundation Visiting Fellow at Notre-Dame University in 2004-2005 and another one at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University (2012).

Brodeur recently founded a social entrepreneurship NGO called InterWorldView to improve the transformative capacities of peace builders worldwide. He has lead over fifty workshops on this theme in five languages on five continents. Last year, he was named one of fifty worldwide “Interfaith Visionaries” by the Temple of Understanding, one of the oldest interfaith organizations based in New York City. He is currently involved in several research projects, one of which is on “Pluralism in Crisis” co-organized by academics at Cornell University and the University of Edinburgh, among others.

Brodeur’s most recent book, co-authored with Dr. Ina Merdjanova, is Religion as a Conversation Starter: Interreligious Dialogue for Peacebuilding in the Balkans, 1990-2008 (Continuum Press, 2009; paperback 2011).

Nicholas Dungan is a Senior Fellow in the Transatlantic Relations Program of the Atlantic Council in Washington DC, a Senior Advisor to the Institut de Relations Internationales et Stratégiques (IRIS) in Paris, a writer, author, speaker and commentator on international relations, politics and business. 

Nicholas Dungan was president of the New York-based French-American Foundation from 2005 to 2008. During his tenure, the French-American Foundation saw significant growth in its visibility, influence, programmatic offering and resources. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Chatham House Foundation, the U.S. arm of the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House in London, and a former Associate Fellow of Chatham House, where he initiated and implemented a multi-year project, jointly with the Belgian Royal Institute of International Relations, on the changing role of non-state actors in international relations. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Foreign Policy Association in New York.

Nicholas Dungan has published in the International Herald Tribune, Le Monde, Le Figaro and Rue89, among others. He has been quoted as a transatlantic policy expert in virtually all the daily and weekly printed press in France as well as by the Associated Press, NBC News, Politico, USA Today and a range of regional newspapers in the United States. He has also published articles in Politique américaine, the Revue internationale et stratégique, The World Today (the monthly magazine of Chatham House), International Affairs, Euromoney, Corporate Finance and International Financing Review, and contributed analyses to Oxford Analytica on finance, economics and corporate governance. He makes frequent appearances on television, including the BBC, Bloomberg, France24, Canal+ and BFM TV and LCI (French news channels); he has participated in radio broadcasts on NPR, Europe1, France Culture, Radio France International, RTL, BFM Radio and others.

He has spoken to the European Union Studies Center in New York, the French-American Foundation, the Historic New Orleans Collection, the Huguenot Society, the Jackson Hole Historical Society, the Museum of the City of New York, the New-York Historical Society and the Paris American Club and he has also been a featured speaker at conferences arranged by the Aspen Institute, the Alliance Program of Columbia University and the Institut de Relations Internationales et Stratégiques.

Prior to joining the French-American Foundation, Nicholas Dungan spent more than twenty years as an international investment banker in New York, London and Paris. He held senior positions with several major international firms, notably Merrill Lynch and Société Générale; he also acquired significant advisory experience from smaller platforms, including his own firm Dungan Associates LLC. Assignments performed by Mr. Dungan during his investment banking career include prominent financing transactions, mergers & acquisitions and strategic advisory services for, among others, some of the largest multinational companies and financial institutions in France, as well as clients in the U.S. and multiple European countries including Belgium, Germany, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the U.K., in addition to Bahrain, Kuwait and Turkey. He participated in structuring and led the private placement of the then-largest structured quasi-equity financing ever executed in Europe, a $1.2 billion issue of perpetual capital notes for the then-nationalized French corporation Rhône-Poulenc.

Nicholas Dungan is a member of the board of directors of the Sciences Po Alumni USA. He is a graduate of Sciences Po Paris, Stanford University and St. Paul’s School. Having spent most of his adult life living in London and Paris, he returned to the United States in 2004 and is currently based in New York City.

Professor Afsaruddin is the author of Striving in the Path of God: Jihad and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought and Praxis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); The First Muslims: History and Memory (Oxford: OneWorld Publications 2008); and Excellence and Precedence: Medieval Islamic Discourse on Legitimate Leadership (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002).  She is also the editor of Islam, the State, and Political Authority (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011), Hermaneutics and Honor: Negotiation of Female “Public” Space in Islamic/ate Societies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1999), and co-editor (with Mathias Zahniser) of Humanism, Culture, and Language in the Near East : Essays in Honor of Georg Krotkoff (Eisenbrauns: Winona Lake, Ind., 1997).

She has also written over fifty research articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries exploring issues as diverse as pluralism and dialogue in the Qur’an, moderation in Islamic thought; exegetical, legal, and ethical approaches to war and peace in Islam, political Islam, hadith criticism, roles of Muslim women, and Muslim-Christian relations. She has lectured widely in the US, Europe, and the Middle East on these topics and frequently consults with US governmental and private agencies and media outlets on contemporary Islamic movements, inter-faith, and gender issues.

In fall 2003, she was a visiting scholar at the Centre for Islamic Studies at the School for Oriental and African Studies, London, UK, and has been a fellow of the American Research Center of Egypt in Cairo and the American Research Institute of Turkey in Istanbul. Afsaruddin is currently a senior editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Women (2012), an advisor to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life for the project “Global Survey of Muslims,” chair of the board of directors of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy; member of the advisory board of a new project called Intertwined Worlds based at the Woolf Institute, Cambridge University, a member of the advisory board of Karamah, and a member of the academic council of the Prince al-Waleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University.  Since 2007, she has been a frequent participant in the Building Bridges seminar, a Christian-Muslim dialogue convened annually by the Archbishop of Canterbury, England.

Her research has been funded among others by the American Research Institute of Turkey, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which named her a Carnegie Scholar in 2005.

Dr. Michelle Miller is a Research Fellow in the Asian Urbanisms Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Her research focuses on the interplay between decentralization, conflict resolution and urban change in Asia, especially in Indonesia.

She previously taught at Deakin University and Charles Darwin University in Australia. Michelle is the author of Rebellion and Reform in Indonesia (London and New York: Routledge 2009, reprinted 2010), and has published articles and book chapters on decentralization, minority rights, the politics of Islamic law, urban-rural relations and armed separatism in Indonesia’s north-westernmost province of Aceh.

Ali A. Mazrui is Professor and Director of the Center for Global Cultural Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton. Dr. Mazrui is also Senior Scholar in Africana Studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and Senior Fellow of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Currently he is also President of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists of North America.

Ali Mazrui was educated in Kenya, Great Britain and the United States, and has a doctorate from Oxford University, U.K. Since then he has held professorships in Uganda, Nigeria, Guyana, and the United Kingdom as well as the United States. He has published more than thirty books, and hundreds of articles.

Dr. Mazrui has served in the past as President of the Africana Studies Association of the United States, Vice-President of the International Political Science Association, and Chancellor of Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology in Kenya.Professor Mazrui has received multiple honorary doctorates in diverse academic fields, and holds national decorations awarded by the Heads of State of South Africa and Kenya.

In 2005 the American Journal Foreign Policy, and the British Journal, Prospect, nominated Ali Mazrui among the top 100 public intellectuals alive in the world as a whole. Mazrui was earlier elected as icon of the Twentieth Century by Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. In 2010 Ali Mazrui was officially recognized by the Head of State of Kenya as among the top ten distinguished scholars of Kenya of the last fifty years (designated as among Mashujaa or “Heroes of the Nation”).

Professor Mazrui’s most ambitious books over the years have included A World Federation of Cultures; Cultural Forces in World Politics; and Euro-Jews and Afro-Arabs: The Great Semitic Divergence in World History.

Dr. Mazrui’s most influential television work was his TV series The Africans: A Triple Heritage in nine episodes, first broadcast by the BBC and PBS in 1986, and since shown in diverse countries and translated into several languages. A Companion book with the same title was published simultaneously.