Karim Sadjadpour is a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was previously an Analyst with the International Crisis Group, based in Tehran and Washington. He is the author of “Reading Khamenei: The World View of Iran’s Most Powerful Leader.” He appears frequently on CNN, BBC, and NPR, and has written for The Economist, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Foreign Policy. In 2007, he was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in Davos. He has lived in Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East and speaks Persian, Italian, and Spanish. He is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.


Vahid Yücesoy is PhD candidate in political science/international relations at Université de Montréal, Canada. Vahid is also a geopolitical analyst with I-Strategic, writing reports on emerging socio-economic trends in the MENA region. He is also a commentator for various English, French, Turkish, and Persian news outlets including Radio-Canada, La Presse, Le Devoir, Al-Jazeera English, and Radio-Zamaneh.

Dr. Ladan Boroumand is the co-founder of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for the Promotion of Human Rights and Democracy in Iran, a nongovernmental organization that promotes human rights awareness through education and information dissemination, including by way of the online human rights library Omid memorial, a website that documents human rights abuses committed by the Islamic Republic and memorializes its victims. In addition, she serves on the Steering Committee of the World Movement for Democracy. A historian by training, she is the author of the book La Guerre des Principes (1999), which examines the tensions between human rights and national sovereignty during the French Revolution, and has also published articles on the French Revolution, the Islamic revolution in Iran, and the nature of Islamist terrorism.