Bernard Haykel is a scholar of the Arabian Peninsula, focusing on the history, politics and economics of Saudi Arabia, the other Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC), and Yemen. He is professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University where he is also director of the Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. Professor Haykel is presently completing one on modern Saudi political history that will be published by Princeton University Press. He is considered an authority on Islamist political movements and Islamic law and is the author of numerous articles on the politics and history of Saudi Arabia and Yemen, Salafism, and Islamism. He has supervised over 10 PhD dissertations on Arabian politics and history and has received several prominent awards, such as the Prize Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, the Carnegie Corporation and Guggenheim fellowships and the Old Dominion Professorship at Princeton. Professor Haykel appears frequently in print and broadcast media, including PBS, NPR, the New York Times, Project Syndicate and the BBC among others. He earned his D.Phil. in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford.

Greg Conti is a political theorist and intellectual historian. His research focuses on the history of modern political thought, especially on questions of liberalism, democracy, and representative government. His first book, Parliament the Mirror of the Nation: Representation, Deliberation, and Democracy in Victorian Britain, was released from Cambridge University Press earlier in 2019.