Jaroslav Jakš is a professor of international relations and one of the founding members of Metropolitan University Prague. He teaches Policies of the European Union and European Economic Integration and sits on the MUP Rector's Board. Professor Jakš is also a member of Team Europe Czech Republic, a Prague based group at the EU representation of the European Commission in the Czech Republic. Professor Jakš has received several scholarships in Germany, Belgium, and the United Kingdom.

Fawaz A. Gerges is a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science where he holds the Emirates Chair in Contemporary Middle Eastern Studies. He was the LSE's inaugural Director of the Middle East Centre from 2010 until 2013. He earned a doctorate from Oxford University and M.Sc. from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has taught at Oxford, Harvard, and Columbia, and was a research scholar at Princeton and chair-holder at Sarah Lawrence College, New York. He is author of several acclaimed books, including newly-released - ISIS: A History (Princeton University Press, March 2016), The New Middle East: Social Protest and Revolution in the Arab World (Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Contentious Politics in the Middle East: Popular Resistance and Marginalised Activism beyond the Arab Uprisings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

Karel Černý is a sociologist from Charles University in Prague who focuses on the contemporary Middle East and on structural sources of its instability from historical, sociological, and comparative perspectives. His book on the subject matter Great Middle Eastern Instability is going to be published in English in 2016. Karel Černý also deals with sociological empirical research of migration and integration of people from the Middle East. He was a Fulbright fellow at the University of California in Santa Barbara (2012-2013) and also a principal researcher in a research project (2013-2015) dealing with the Arab revolutions.

Pieter D. Wezeman is a senior researcher with the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Arms and Military Expenditure Programme. His area of research is the global production and proliferation of conventional arms with a special focus on military expenditure and arms procurement in and arms transfers to the Middle East and Africa. He also monitors multilateral arms embargoes and maintains the SIPRI database on that issue.

Andrea Gilli is a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for Security Studies, Metropolitan University Prague. He holds a Ph.D. in Social and Political Science from the European University Institute (EUI) in Fiesole (Florence, Italy), and a MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). In 2015, Andrea Gilli was awarded the European Defence Agency and Egmont Institute's bi-annual prize for the best dissertation on European defence, security and strategy. He has provided consulting services for both private and public organisations working on defence and security issues and been associated with RUSI in London, the Center for Transatlantic Relations at the SAIS/Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC, the European Union Institute for Security Studies in Paris, and the Saltzman Institute for War and Peace Studies at the Columbia University in New York.

Mitchell A. Belfer is the founder and Head of the Department of International Relations and European Studies at Metropolitan University Prague and Editor in Chief of the Central European Journal of International and Security Studies (CEJISS). He holds a Ph.D. and an MPA in International Relations Theory and his academic interests gravitate around: alliance theory, small states, dangerous regions, the international relations of the Persian Gulf and Middle East, asymmetrical violence, and general security-related issues. What began as a strictly alliance-centric focus has morphed into a multi-layered understanding of alliances that investigates the manner in which an alliance's major to minor and its minor to minor dyads within the alliance behave to one another.

Gabriela Özel Volfová is a researcher at the Oriental Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Ph.D. candidate at Metropolitan University Prague. She obtained her BA degree in English Literature from Mount Holyoke College in the USA and her MA degree in Nationalism Studies from Central European University in Budapest. She was a research assistant in the Political Science Department at Bilkent University in Ankara, and taught in the History Department at Koç University in Istanbul. Her research interests include Turkish policy, nationalism, and gender in Islam. She has published articles on the role of social media in the Arab revolutions, and on changes in Turkish foreign policy in the context of the Arab Spring.

Břetislav Tureček is the Head of the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Metropolitan University Prague. For more than two decades he was a journalist and traveling reporter covering the Middle Eastern political and social issues, between 2008-2013 he worked as a Middle East correspondent of the Czech Radio based in Jerusalem. Břetislav Tureček authored three journalistic books on the region, a fourth one is to be published in autumn 2016.