Read more about our Contributors

Ashish Khanna is a master's student in Eurasian Studies at the Centre for Central EurasianStudies,University of Mumbai. His research interests include International Relations theory, Chinese foreign policy, the foreign policy of small states, Eurasian geopolitics, strategic autonomy.

C. F. Legrand is an independent researcher with a Master of Philosophy in Political Science. Her work examines how states wield economic tools as instruments of coercion, with particular attention to the deepening rivalry between the United States and China. She has conducted various research on great-power competition, sanctions policy, and international political economy. This article has been written under a pseudonym.

Anusreeta Dutta is a columnist and climate researcher with experience in political research analysis, ESG research, and energy policy.

Hannah Fearnside is a lawyer with almost a decade of practice and policy experience in family violence and family law. She is a Master of Public Policy student and research affiliate at the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership. Hannah is a participant in the Women in Strategic Policy (WISP) program run by the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at ANU and Girls Run the World. A professional ‘yapper and tapper’, Hannah sits on the board of Voices of Influence and is passionate about access to justice, intersectional feminism and gender equality. She was a 2026 delegate to the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations in New York City and Women Deliver in Melbourne with The Persephone Network.

Debomita Dasgupta is an independent policy researcher based in Melbourne, working on Indo-Pacific governance and climate security. Her writing has appeared in the Lowy Institute's The Interpreter and the Devpolicy Blog (ANU).

Keith Paolo C. Landicho is a member of the 2026 Indo-Pacific Cooperation Network. He is currently a Research Associate on the Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) Programme at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He obtained a Bachelor of Science (Geography) from the University of the Philippines and was a Disaster Monitoring and Analysis Officer at the AHA Centre from 2020 to 2023. He is currently a member of the ASEAN Emergency Response and Assessment Team and was deployed to Myanmar in 2023 for the Cyclone MOCHA response operations and consultation workshops to operationalise the ASEAN 5-Point Consensus.

Sunny Han is a fourth-year Honours student in International Relations at the Australian National University. His research focuses on Chinese foreign policy in the Pacific Islands region, where he examines the Austronesian narrative in Chinese foreign policy discourse. He has worked as a Research Assistant at the ANU Centre for Social Policy Research and at the Australian Centre on China in the World, where he supported research on Chinese Australians' involvement in Indigenous politics. Sunny is currently an intern for Events and Public Engagement at the Australian Institute of International Affairs.

Steve Chan is College Professor of Distinction Emeritus and formerly chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His research interests focus on international relations, political economy, foreign policy, decision-making, East Asia, and especially Sino-American relations. His publications include thirty books and over two hundred articles and chapters. His recent books are The Future of Pacific Asia (Routledge, 2026, co-authored with Weixing Hu); Gauging China’s Influence Abroad (Cambridge University Press, 2026); Mobilizing the Past (Stanford University Press, 2025); Punctuated Equilibria and Sino-American Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2025); Fuses, Chains, and Backlashes (Oxford University Press, 2025); Geography and International Conflict (Routledge, 2025; co-authored with Weixing Hu); Taiwan and the Danger of a Sino-American War (Cambridge University Press, 2024); Culture, Economic Growth, and Interstate Power Shifts (Cambridge University Press, 2024); Rumbles of Thunder (Columbia University Press, 2022); Contesting Revisionism (Oxford University Press, 2021; co-authored with Huiyun Feng, Kai He, and Weixing Hu); and Thucydides’ Trap? (University of Michigan Press, 2020).

Francis A. Beer is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Colorado, Boulder. He received his A. B. (1960) from Harvard and M. A. (1963) and Ph.D. (1967) from the University of California, Berkeley. In addition, he has been associated in different ways with the Fondation nationale des sciences politiques and the University of Bordeaux in France; the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven in the Netherlands; the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom; the Ohio State University, the Universities of Iowa, Michigan, and Texas in the United States. His books include: Meanings of War and Peace; Peace Against War: The Ecology of International Violence and Integration and Disintegration in NATO: Processes of Alliance Cohesion and Prospects for Atlantic Community as well as related monographs on The Political Economy of Alliances and How Much War in History. He has edited Alliances: Latent War Communities in the Contemporary World. He has co-edited with Christ’l De Landtsheer Metaphorical World Politics and, with Robert Hariman, Post-Realism: The Rhetorical Turn in International Relations. He has been Chair of the Boulder Faculty Assembly and President of the International Studies Association/West. He co-edited with Ted Gurr a series of Sage books on "Violence, Conflict, Cooperation." Professor Beer is listed in Who’s Who in the World and Who’s Who in America.

Dr Steven T. Zech is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Monash University where he teaches courses on contemporary security topics, political violence, and comparative politics. His general research interests include political violence, human security, militias, contentious politics, civility, and countering threats to liberal democracy.