Carol Giacomo is a former diplomatic correspondent for Reuters in Washington, covered foreign policy for the international wire service for more than two decades before joining The Times editorial board in August 2007. In her previous position, she traveled over 1 million miles to more than 100 countries with eight secretaries of state and various other senior U.S. officials. In 2009, she won the Georgetown University Weintal Prize for diplomatic reporting. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1999-2000, she was a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, researching U.S. economic and foreign policy decision-making during the Asian financial crisis. She was a Ferris professor of journalism at Princeton University in 2013 and has been a guest lecturer at the U.S. National War College, among other academic institutions.

Yaël Eisenstat has spent 16 years working at the intersection of global political, social and security issues, as a CIA analyst, a diplomat, the senior intelligence officer at the National Counterterrorism Center, a national security advisor to Vice President Biden, a corporate social responsibility strategist for a Fortune 500 company, and the head of a global political risk firm. She is the founder of Kilele Global an advisory firm providing intelligence-based advice to help companies and start-ups operating in emerging markets do so smartly and with purpose. She has  been published in the New York Times and TIME, has appeared on CNN, CBS News and in policy forums, and has been a guest lecturer at a number of universities.