Keir Giles spent the early 1990s in business in the former USSR, including co-founding the first company providing Western pilots with the opportunity to fly Soviet military aircraft. With the BBC Monitoring Service (BBCM), he reported on political and economic affairs in the former Soviet Union for UK government customers. As well as BBC broadcast experience, Keir wrote for several years as a Russia correspondent for UK aviation journals. Other professional experience in Russia included a period with Ernst & Young analysing and reporting on intricate and constantly shifting Russian tax law.

While attached to the UK Defence Academy's Research and Assessment Branch (R&AB), Keir Giles wrote and briefed for UK and overseas government and academic customers on Russian military, defence and security issues, Russia's relations with NATO and with its neighbours in Northern Europe, and human factors affecting decision-making in Russia.

Dr El-Katiri is a legal consultant with a strong background in economics and international trade. He operates as a freelance consultant on Moroccan law, and has researched and written extensively on economic and political aspects of the Middle East. His main areas of expertise include energy and food security, international trade and investment flows, and Euro-Mediterranean relations.

During his work with the UK Defence Academy, Mohammed regularly briefed senior officers and worked with numerous Arab media outlets, providing analysis and assessment supporting UK interests.

Mohammed holds a PhD in International Trade from the University of Exeter and a Masters in International Law from the University of Seville.

Shima Keene is a former senior investment banker and corporate strategist based in the City of London. Between 2004 and 2008 she was based at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom in Shrivenham, where she was Director of the Security Technology Executive Short Course at the Cranfield Forensic Institute, and Advisor to the Advanced Research and Assessment Group on Security Economics.

More recently between March 2009 and March 2010, Shima was appointed Special Advisor to the MoD in Counter-Insurgency Finance based in Whitehall, where she had responsibility for the assessment and recommendations for the development of Fin COIN strategies in Afghanistan.

Shima advises numerous UK government departments, law enforcement agencies, NATO and various private sector organisations on a number of security related issues relating to terrorism and organised crime. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre of International Documentation on Economic and Organised Crime at Cambridge University, a member of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London University and lectures in International Criminal Law and Security Risk Management.

Charles Blandy followed a 28-year career with the British Army with an analytical and advisory role with the original Soviet Studies Research Centre, specialising in artillery and sustainability within the Soviet armed forces. Charles went on to develop deep expertise on the volatile North and South Caucasus regions, and the implications of ethnic confrontation for the wider region and particularly for energy security.

One of Charles's most celebrated recent analytical papers noted Russian activity in disputed regions of Georgia as characteristic of preparations for military action; the paper was published three weeks before the Russian-Georgian war of August 2008.