Mr. Brian Stewart
One of Canada's most experienced journalists and foreign correspondents, Brian Stewart was, until his retirement in the summer of 2009, a Senior Correspondent with CBC's flagship news program, The National, and the host of Newsworld's international affairs program. He is currently a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto. In almost four decades of reporting, he has covered many of the world's conflicts and reported from 10 war zones, from El Salvador to Beirut and Afghanistan. Though retired, he continues to write a regular column for CBCNews.ca on international affairs.

Ambassador Paul Heinbecker
A career diplomat, Ambassador Paul Heinbecker joined the Department of External Affairs in 1965, with the Permanent Delegation of Canada to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD); in Ottawa, he served, inter alia, as Director of the United States General Relations Division and as Chairman of the Policy Development Secretariat in External Affairs. In 1992, he was named Ambassador to Germany. On his return to Canada, he was appointed Assistant Deputy Minister of Global and Security Policy, and Political Director in the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. Ambassador Heinbecker led the departmental task force on the, abortive, Canadian-led intervention in Zaire and the interdepartmental task force on Kosovo and helped to negotiate the end of that war. He headed the Canadian delegation for the negotiation of the Climate Change Convention in Kyoto. In the summer of 2000, Ambassador Heinbecker was appointed Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Canada to the United Nations. In that capacity, he represented Canada in the UN Security Council where he was a leading advocate for and defender of the International Criminal Court and a proponent of compromise on Iraq to give UN weapons inspectors more time to complete their work. He represented Canada at the contentious Durban conference on human rights. Paul Heinbecker is the inaugural director of the Centre for Global Relations, at Wilfrid Laurier University and is a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) in Waterloo.

Dr. Vera Achvarina
Vera Achvarina is an Assistant Professor at the Political Science Department, University of Toronto. She obtained her Master's degree in East Asian Studies and PhD in Public and International Affairs from the University of Pittsburgh, USA. Her primary research interests focus on intrastate wars and mobilization of people for armed conflict, including recruitment of children. Her secondary research interests involve human security issues; refugee and IDP movements as well as militarization/securitization of displacement camps; and promotion, diffusion, and effectiveness (in commitment and compliance) of international norms, especially in relation to international humanitarian law and behavior of non-state actors during armed conflict. In 2006 she was a visiting researcher at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo, Norway. She has published several articles, including in the journal International Security. She is currently working on a book and journal articles based on her dissertation.

Dr. Howard Adelman
Howard Adelman retired as Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at York University in 2003. Adelman was one of the founders of Rochdale College, as well as the founder and director of York's Centre for Refugee Studies. He was editor of Refuge for ten years, and since his retirement he has received several honorary university and governmental appointments in Canada and abroad. Adelman was the recipient of numerous awards and grants, and presented the inaugural lecture in a series named in his honor at York University in 2008. The author, coauthor or editor of 23 scholarly books and over 100 articles and book chapters, in addition to numerous other papers, addresses, and professional reports, Adelman has written extensively on the Middle East, humanitarian intervention, membership rights, ethics, early warning and conflict management, refugee repatriation, policy and resettlement, including his contribution in 2000 to the Institutional Component of the Early Warning and Conflict Management System set up by IGAD (Intergovernmental Authority on Development) for the Horn of Africa.

Dr. Alan Alexandroff
Alan Alexandroff is currently the Research Director of the Program on Conflict Management and Negotiation (PCMN) at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto.Dr. Alexandroff leads currently the Global Institutional Reform (GIR) Workshop designed to evaluate the adequacy of institutional reform proposals for the international system. The Workshop has led to the recent publication, where Dr. Alexandroff is the editor of "Can the World be Governed? Possibilities for Effective Multilateralism." A second volume "Rising States; Rising Institutions: Can the World be Governed?" is now completed. His research and writing address: trade, investment and trade policy in Canada and North America; the multilateral trading system, global governance and China's integration into the global economy. Dr. Alexandroff received his B.A., cum laude with distinction in all subjects from Cornell University, an M.A. and Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University, an M.A. in International History from the London School of Political Science and Economics and an L.L.B. from the McGill University Law School.

Dr. Andrew Andersen
Andrew Andersen received his Master's degree from Moscow State University in 1980 where he later taught. In 1984 he obtained his Ph.D. from Moscow State University. Andersen's Ph.D. thesis analyzed US role in the Vietnam War (1962-75) and its mass-media coverage. At the beginning of the Perestroyka, Andersen left the USSR and settled in Germany, where he coordinated a number of Eastern European seminars, courses and projects organized by Wirtschaftsakademie in Kiel (Schleswig-Holstein). In 1994, Andrew Andersen immigrated to Canada. Between 1994 and 2003 Andrew Andersen taught at Simon Frazer University and the University of Victoria while doing intensive research of the dynamics of political situation and conflicts in the Caucasus and other areas of Asia. In 2003 became a research fellow at the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, University of Calgary. Andersen has written a number of books and articles for national and international professional magazines on ethnic, territorial and ideological conflicts, as well as on other international security-related issues with the recent emphasis on the South Caucasus / Black Sea region.

Dr. Robert Bothwell
Professor Bothwell received his Ph.D. from Harvard and currently teaches at the University of Toronto. A specialist in post-1945 international and Canadian history, Professor Bothwell is the co-author of a list of books including C.D. Howe (1979), Canada 1900-1945 (1987), Canada Since 1945 (1989), Pirouette (1990), Our Century (2000). He has also written Eldorado (1984), Nucleus (1989), Canada and the United States (1992), Canada and Quebec (1995), The Big Chill (1998), The Penguin History of Canada (2006) and Alliance and Illusion (2007). He has been a co-editor and editor of the Canadian Historical Review (1972-80). He is working on a book on Canadian foreign relations since 1984.

Dr. Rex Brynen
Rex Brynen is Professor of Political Science at McGill University. He is author of A Very Political Economy: Peacebuilding and Foreign Aid in the West Bank and Gaza (2000) and Sanctuary and Survival: The PLO in Lebanon (1990), and editor/coeditor of Palestinian Refugees: Challenges of Repatriation and Development (2007), Persistent Permeabilities: Regionalism, Localism, and Globalization in the Middle East (2004), and four other books. In addition to his academic work, Prof. Brynen has served as a member of the Political and Security Policy Staff of the (Canadian) Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade; as an analyst for the International Assessment Secretariat of the Privy Council (cabinet) Office; and as a consultant to the Canadian International Development Agency, the International Development Research Centre, the World Bank, the United Nations, and others.

Dr. Stanislav Kirschbaum
Stanislav Kirschbaum, born in Bratislava, Slovakia, is a graduate of the Universities of Ottawa (BScSoc), Toronto (MA) and Paris (DRech). He is also a graduate of the National Defence College of Canada (1982). He has been teaching International Studies and Political Science at Glendon College, York University, Toronto, Canada since 1970. Previously he taught at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario in 1969-1970. He has also held visiting professorships at the Université de Montréal and Université Laval in Quebec City and at Trnavská Univerzita in Trnava, Slovakia. He is a specialist of Central European security and politics, focusing particularly on Czechoslovakia and Slovakia. He has published more than 70 scholarly articles, edited 14 books, and is the author of Slovaques et Tchèques. Essai sur un nouvel aperçu de leur histoire politique, 1987, A History of Slovakia. The Struggle for Survival, 2nd edition, 2005, and Historical Dictionary of Slovakia, 2nd edition, 2007. He was made a Chevalier des Palmes académiques de France in 1994, received the Commemorative Medal from Matica Slovenská in Slovakia in 1995, the Jubilee Medal from Trnavská univerzita v Trnave in 2008, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2002.

Dr. John Murray
John specializes in training and coaching individuals in public and non-governmental organizations as they address communal conflict, with particular attention to water and other natural resource concerns. He currently provides long-term assistance to the Palestinian Negotiation Support Unit and offers training in negotiation and communication skills to students and professionals from the Middle East region. In addition to his consulting work, John teaches international conflict management at Johns Hopkins University's School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS). John's background includes military service, state-level elective office, law and education. He retired in 2005 as Professor of Practice in International Relations at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University and Associate Director of Maxwell's Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts (PARC). Prior to teaching at Syracuse, John taught conflict management and international law at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, and before that, at Texas Tech School of Law. He also co-founded and served as acting executive director, then as president of the Conflict Clinic, Inc., a negotiation and mediation firm established with the support of the Harvard Negotiation Project. John received a BA with Honors from Cornell University, a Master's Degree in Public Law and Government from Columbia University, and a JD from the University of Iowa College of Law, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Iowa Law Review.

Dr. Arnold Melvyn Noyek
Dr. Noyek, a medical doctor, is the Founder of the Canada International Scientific Exchange Program (CISEPO), a volunteer, federally incorporated, charitable organization based at Mount Sinai Hospital (PASCIH) and the University of Toronto. CISEPO aims to contribute to peacebuilding in the Middle East through academic and scientific exchanges among universities and medical centres by fostering cooperative multi-lateral projects. CISEPO's emphasis since 1995 is on the development and operation of people-to-people and technology-supported collaborative academic medical and scientific programs (education, research, training, scientific exchange) among Canadians, Israelis, Jordanians and Palestinians in support of regional co-operation and building trust and confidence across the Arab and Israeli frontier – and thus ultimately contributing to peacebuilding. CISEPO’s projects build social capital through cooperative capacity-building, influence national health policy, produce leading international scientific contributions and create a significant critical mass of people-to-people interactions for common ground, community needs – across communities, borders, institutions, ministries, faiths and cultures – while advancing professional and societal development. Dr Noyek’s multifaceted involvements, innovations and networking have had a profound local, national and international influence. His career accomplishments have had a significant world-wide impact on the professional development of his health specialty, allied specialties and academic and scientific advancement through education, research, effecting best practice and societal change.