Barbara F. Walter, PhD, is the Rohr Professor of International Affairs at the School of Global Policy & Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. She received her Ph.D from the University of Chicago and completed post docs at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University and the War and Peace Institute at Columbia University.

Walter is one of the world’s leading experts on civil wars, political violence, and terrorism. Her books include the award-winning Committing to Peace: Why Negotiations Fail, Reputation and Civil War, and Civil Wars, Insecurity, and Intervention. Her newest book — How Civil Wars Start (and How to Stop Them) — explores whether the U.S. is heading toward a second civil war.

Walter is the recipient of the 2022 National Peacemaker Award, the Susan Strange Award (given to the scholar of international studies “whose singular intellect, assertiveness, and insight most challenge conventional wisdom and international and organizational complacency”), and is a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a frequent live guest on CNN, MSNBC and an occasional consultant for the World Bank, the United Nations, the Departments of Defense and State, and the January 6th Committee. Walter occasionally writes for the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times, and is very happy when her research is showcased in the New York Times or the New Yorker, her favorite hometown publications. In 2012, she founded the blog Political Violence @ a Glance (with Erica Chenoweth) which sometimes beats out the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage for Best Group Blog of the Year.

Farai Chideya is creator and host of Our Body Politic, a nationally-syndicated public radio show, podcast, and insights brand that centers Black women and women of color. She’s the author of six books, and has worked for FiveThirtyEight, NPR, CNN, and ABC News, and has covered political extremists for a quarter century and every presidential election since 1996.

Chideya was also a program officer focusing on journalism with the Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression team; and spent four years as a distinguished writer in residence at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.