Ayşe Zarakol is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge and a Politics Fellow at Emmanuel College. She is the author of After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which deals with international stigmatisation and the integration of defeated non-Western powers (Turkey after WWI, Japan after WWII and Russia after the Cold War) into the international order. Her most recent book, Before the West: the Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders, which advances an alternative global history for IR focused on (Eur)asia, was published in 2022 by Cambridge University Press. This book retheorises sovereignty, order and decline from a more global perspective. It has won best book prizes from the Social Science History Association (SSHA Sharlin Award), International Studies Association (ISA Ruggie Award), International Studies Association Northeast (ISA-NE Ferguson Award), ISA History section (HIST Guicciardini Prize), ISA Theory section (Best Book Honorable Mention) and American Political Science Association International Politics and History section (Jervis and Schroeder Award Honorable Mention). Currently, she is leading a multiple year British Academy Knowledge Frontiers grant that bring IR scholars and Global historians together to study historical periods of disorder.

Vili Lehdonvirta is Professor of Technology Policy at the Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Finland, and Senior Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK. He leads the Digital Economic Security Lab (DIESL). He has been awarded three European Research Council grants for studies on the international political economy of digital technologies.

Jon Lindsay is an Associate Professor at the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). His research explores the role of emerging technology in global security. He is the author of Age of Deception: Cybersecurity as Secret Statecraft (Cornell, 2025) and Information Technology and Military Power (Cornell, 2020), co-author with Erik Gartzke of Elements of Deterrence: Strategy, Technology, and Complexity in Global Politics (Oxford, 2024), and the editor of Cross-Domain Deterrence: Strategy in an Era of Complexity (Oxford, 2019) and China and Cybersecurity: Espionage, Strategy, and Politics in the Digital Domain (Oxford, 2015). He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an M.S. in computer science and B.S. in symbolic systems from Stanford University. He also served in the U.S. Navy with operational assignments in Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East.

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