Amaney A. Jamal is Dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Politics, and Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. She is the former Director of the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice. Jamal directs the Workshop on Arab Political Development and the Bobst Center-American University of Beirut Collaborative Initiative. Jamal is the co-founder and co-principal Investigator of the Arab Barometer Project (Winner of the Best Dataset in the Field of Comparative Politics (Lijphart/Przeworski/Verba Dataset Award 2010), and has secured over $5 million in grants for this and other projects from the U.S.-Middle East Partnership Initiative, National Science Foundation (NSF), NSF: Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences, Qatar National Research Fund, United States Institute of Peace, the International Development Research Centre, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Henry Luce Foundation. In 2006, Jamal was named a Carnegie Scholar. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan (2003). Her areas of specialization are the Middle East and North Africa, mass and political behavior, political development and democratization, inequality and economic segregation, Muslim immigration (U.S. and Europe), gender, race, religion, and class.

Kanni Wignaraja is the UN Assistant Secretary-General and Regional Director for Asia and the Pacific at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). With over 30 years of experience in the United Nations, she has held senior leadership roles in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and at the United Nations in Geneva and New York.

Wignaraja brings in-depth knowledge of the Asia-Pacific region. She frequently speaks and writes on the complex challenges that will define the region’s future on human development and human rights, sustainability and disaster response, energy transition and climate change, inequality and social protection, development and climate finance. Wignaraja has particularly underscored the urgency of rethinking development strategies in complex crises, such as those in Afghanistan and Myanmar, as well as policy and governance reforms needed with intensifying interconnected economic and climate crises today. She is an advocate for people-centered perspectives and policies that secure peoples’ futures while protecting the environment.

Before taking up her current role, Wignaraja led UNDP’s Bureau for Management Services, where she oversaw UNDP’s central support services across human resources, finances, administration, budget, procurement, information technology, legal affairs, and security operations for the organization’s $5bn+ annual operations. From 2014 to 2018, Wignaraja led the UN’s Development Operations Coordination Office, overseeing a network of 130+ UN Resident Coordinators (RC) responsible for the coherent and efficient delivery of UN development assistance, globally. Prior to that, she held various leadership roles with the UN/UNDP, including as Senior Policy Advisor to the UNDP Administrator, Director of UNDP’s Capacity Development Group; UN RC/RR to Zambia, and also served in Indonesia and Vietnam.

 Manizha Wafeq is the co-founder of the Afghanistan Women Chamber of Commerce and Industry (AWCCI). She served as the CEO of the AWCCI for five years. Manizha Wafeq has 20 years of experience in development and for 16 years has been focused on women’s empowerment and gender equality working with international, government, and non-governmental organizations. She has an MBA from the American University of Afghanistan. Her persistent and influential lobbying skills resulted in several policy recommendations being incorporated and approved. Among them were the 5 percent preference clause in the national procurement procedure of the government and for 15 to 25 percent of industrial parks to be allocated to small, medium, and women-owned businesses in the national industrial park’s policy.

She has been teaching in PEACE THROUGH BUSINESS® program for 16 years at the Institute for Economic Empowerment of Women. As country facilitator of this program, she has taught and mentored nearly 600 Afghan businesswomen from Kabul and more than 17 provinces.

Ahmad Zia Wahdat is an applied economist focused on understanding household and food system behaviors and resiliency to identify policy solutions. His research explores consumer behavior, household financial decisions, and attitudes during natural disasters, economic shocks, or policy changes. He also examines the vulnerability and resilience of food supply chains, emphasizing socially and economically disadvantaged groups. His research aims to inform government efforts on household food insecurity and post-disaster food environments using causal inference, lab experiments, and machine learning.

Ahmad Zia has worked extensively with non-profit and academic organizations, including the World Bank, Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan School of Management, German International Cooperation (in Afghanistan), and CSIS, primarily in research and project management roles.

He holds a PhD in Agricultural Economics from Purdue University, a Master of Science in Economics from Tufts University, and a BA Honors in Economics from Oberlin College. Outside of his professional work, Ahmad Zia enjoys cooking, brewing coffee, reading, honing his coding skills, and exploring solutions for disadvantaged groups in society.

Dr Erica Gaston is the Senior Policy Advisor and Head of the Conflict Prevention and Sustaining Peace Programme at United Nations University Centre for Policy Research, where she leads a broad portfolio of peace and security and human rights work, including issues related to security council dynamics, peace operations and peacebuilding, climate, peace and security, and other thematic issues. She recently served as part of the Independent Assessment team mandated by Security Council resolution 2679 (2023) under Special Coordinator, Feridun Sinirlioğlu, and was also the lead author and researcher of the recently published General Assembly Digital Handbook on peace and security, as mandated by resolution 77/335. Her most recent book with Columbia University Press, Illusions of Control: Dilemmas in Managing U.S. Proxy Forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, explores US support to proxy forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and the policy and human rights dilemmas implicit in these partnerships.

Prior to joining UNU-CPR, Dr Gaston worked for 15 years as a practitioner, lawyer and conflict analyst, focusing in particular on issues of conflict-related human rights and civilian protection, rule of law development and security sector reform, and proxy and sub-State conflict dynamics. She has significant field experience in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan, among others. 

Dr Gaston previously served as Project Manager with the Global Public Policy institute (GPPi) in Berlin, overseeing research projects including a multi-year project mapping and analysing the influence of armed groups in Iraq and Afghanistan on regional, national and community dynamics; work advancing the agenda of the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit; and a groundbreaking project exploring changing international norms of self-defence. Prior to that, she led the Rule of Law portfolios for the United States Institute of Peace’s work in Afghanistan and Yemen, with a focus on conflict resolution, women’s access to justice, security sector transition, and informal justice. She worked for a number of years with the Center for Civilians in Conflict and then the Open Society Foundations leading documentation and advocacy related to civilian protection and conflict-related human rights in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Gaston has published and provided commentary widely, including on Lawfare.com, War on the Rocks, the Guardian, Foreign Policy, CNN, Al Jazeera, BBC and others. Her past academic articles in the Harvard International Law Journal and the Harvard National Security Law Journal have examined emerging definitions of soldier self-defence and accountability for private security companies. She has also edited three book compendiums focused on the changing norms and practices in 21st-century conflict.

Dr. Gaston holds a Bachelor’s degree in international relations with a specialization in international security from Stanford University. She received her Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School and recently completed her Doctorate from the University of Cambridge. She has been a recipient of the German Chancellor Fellowship, the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, and served as a term member at the Council in Foreign Relations. She also serves as a Non-Resident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Mohammad Aman Farahi is an economist with over a decade of experience in international development and public finance. He has served in key roles as the Director of Public Investment Management at the Ministry of Finance, country economist with the World Bank, and senior economist with the United Nations Development Program in Afghanistan. He holds a master’s degree from the Barcelona School of Economics and a second master’s degree from Duke University specializing in Public Financial Management. Aman has contributed to several publicly available policy and analytical notes, including the World Bank's Development Updates for Afghanistan 2015-2017, the Fiduciary assessment for the Ministry of Finance 2019, Afghanistan’s National Budget 2018 and 2019, the European Union Budget Support Operation third-party review 2020, and recent articles with the NYU. Aman is currently a part-time consultant with both the IFC and the World Bank in Washington D.C. doing economic analysis of development projects.