People

William Arthurs MRES FCA FRSA (Chairman)

William Arthurs is a member of the Royal Economic Society and of the British Institute of Energy Economics, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and of the Institute of Chartered Accountants. He is a member of the advisory board of the Landscape and Arts Network, and a trustee of the London Society. He read Mathematics, and then Philosophy Politics and Economics, at Trinity College Oxford.

Mark Oaten MP

Mark Oaten has been the Member of Parliament for Winchester since 1997, and was the Liberal Democrats' spokesman on home affairs from 2003 to 2006. www.markoaten.com

Professor Conrad Lichtenstein BSc PhD FRSA

Conrad Lichtenstein is Chief Operating Officer of Population Genetics Technologies Ltd, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Mark Littlewood

Mark Littlewood is Communications Director of Progressive Vision and was formerly Head of Media for the Liberal Democrats. Mark is a regular commentator on home affairs issues in the national media, and occasional sports commentator for SKYtv. He read Philosophy Politics and Economics at Balliol College Oxford.

Ziba Norman FRSA (Director and Founder)

Ziba Norman was educated at the University of California San Diego, where she obtained a BA in English literature, followed by two years as a doctoral student and lecturer. Now resident in the United Kingdom, Ms Norman is a trustee of the Forum for European Philosophy, a member of the editorial board of Prospect Magazine, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

She writes regularly on foreign affairs and political issues. Her articles have been published in, amongst others, the International Herald Tribune, The Observer, Prospect Magazine, El Diario Exterior, and the RSA Journal.

Ms Norman's other interests include working with gifted children, and for the past three years she has been chair of the National Association for Gifted Children (Buckinghamshire Branch).

Rashad Shirinov BA(Baku State University) MA(Bogazici University, Istanbul)

Rashad Shirinov is the country coordinator in Azerbaijan for the World Security Institute's Caucasus Project. He has held a Chevening Fellowship at the University of York, England.

Ashish Bhatt

Ashish Bhatt is an advisor with Canonbury Group. Ashish was previously the Deputy Director of the Ditchley Foundation (http://www.ditchley.co.uk). Before that, he was special adviser to the Rt. Hon. Paul Boateng, Member of Parliament for Brent South between 1987 and 2005.

Dominic Hilton

Dominic Hilton, research fellow with the New Culture Forum, was a commissioning editor, columnist and diarist for openDemocracy from 2001 to 2005. His blog is at http://dominichilton.blogspot.com.

Stephen Howe

Stephen Howe is Professor of the history and cultures of colonialism at the University of Bristol. His most recent books are Empire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2002), Ireland and Empire (Oxford University Press, 2000) and Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (Verso, 1998).

Oliver Kamm

Oliver Kamm is a leader writer at the London Times. He joined in 2008, having been an investment banker and co-founder of a hedge fund. He discusses politics, economics and culture on his Times blog, http://timesonline.typepad.com/oliver_kamm/. He was the first UK-based blogger to cross over into regular newspaper commentary. He is the author of Anti-Totalitarianism: the Left-Wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy (Social Affairs Unit, 2005).

Gregory Katz

Gregory Katz, a writer and commentator based in London, is a correspondent with the Associated Press. His work has also appeared in Esquire, Rolling Stone, Atlantic Monthly and Conde Nast Traveler. He won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 1994.