Amal Kashf Al-Ghitta, a member of the Iraqi National Assembly, directs the Islamic Foundation for Women and Children

Shlomo Avineri is Professor of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a former Director-General of Israel's Foreign Ministry.

Christoph Bertram is Director of the German Institute for International and Security Studies (SWP) in Berlin.

Olivier Blanchard is Professor of Economics at MIT.

Pascal Boniface is Director of the Institute for International and Strategic Relations (IRIS), Paris. His most recent book is Football et Mondialisation (Football and Globalization).

Emma Bonino is a Member of the European Parliament (ALDE Group.

Ian Bremmer is President of Eurasia Group, the global political risk consultancy. His latest book, The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall, will be published in September.

Jimmy Carter - former U.S. President, led The Carter Center/National Democratic Institute observation of the Palestinian elections in January

Jorge Castaneda is a former Foreign Minister of Mexico and currently a candidate for Mexico's presidency.

Satyabrata Rai Chowdhuri, Emeritus Professor at India's University Grants Commission, is a former Professor of International Relations at Oxford University.

Ian Davidson is the author of Voltaire in Exile, a fellow for the Centre for Policy Reform in Brussels, and a former columnist for the Financial Times

J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley, was Assistant US Treasury Secretary during the Clinton administration.

Jiøí Dienstbier was Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia and Special Rapporteur of the UNHRC in the Balkans.

Joschka Fischer, a leader of the Green Party for nearly 20 years, was Germany's Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor from 1998 to 2005.

George P. Fletcher is Cardozo Professor of Jurisprudence at Columbia Univerisity. His latest book is Romantics at War: Glory and Guilt in the Age of Terrorim

Francesco Giavazzi is Professor of Economics at Bocconi University, Milan.

James A. Goldston is Executive Director, Open Society Justice Initiative

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the USSR, is Chairman of the Gorbachev Foundation in Moscow and the head of the International Green Cross.

Richard N. Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Opportunity: America's Chance to Alter History's Course.

Marc Hauser is Professor of Psychology and Director of Primate Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Harvard University;

Václav Havel is former President of the Czech Republic

Ivan Ivanov is the Executive Director of the European Roma Information Office

Ma Jian is the author of The Noodlemaker and Red Dust. After many years in exile, he recently returned to China.

Terry Lynn Karl is Professor of Political Science at Stanford University.

Melvyn Krauss is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Daoud Kuttab is Director of the Institute of Modern Media at Al Quds University in Ramallah

Raphaël Hadas-Lebel, author of 101 Words about French Democracy, is President of the Social Chamber of the Conseil d'Etat and Associate Professor at the Institut d'études politiques in Paris. The views expressed here are his own and do not represent any official position.

Claus Leggewie is Director of the Center for Media and Interactivity at Giessen University, Germany, where he teaches Political Science.

Johannes F. Linn is Executive Director of The Wolfensohn Initiative at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC.

Edward N. Luttwak, a Military Strategist and Consultant, is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C.

Ronald McKinnon is Professor of Economics at Stanford University. His latest book is Exchange Rates Under the East Asian Dollar Standard.

Roy Medvedev, historian and Soviet dissident, is an author of many books, including Stalin: Let History Judge and Khrushchev: The Years in Power (with Zhores Medvedev).

Heleen Mees is an independent adviser on European Union affairs in New York.

Steven Metz is Research Professor and Chairman of the Department of Regional Strategy and Planning at the US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute.

Branko Milanovic is an economist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Kalman Mizsei is the Assistant Administrator and Regional Director for Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States at the United Nations Development Programme.

Dominique Moisi was a founder and is now Senior Advisor at Ifri (French Institute for International Relations), and is a Professor at l'Institut d'études politiques in Paris.

Dina Nay, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge killing fields, is Executive Director, The Khmer Institute of Democracy (KID

Aryeh Neier, the president of the Open Society Institute and a founder of Human Rights Watch, is the author most recently of Taking Liberties: Four Decades in the Struggle for Rights.

Marek Antoni Nowicki, a former member of the European Commission on Human Rights and the co-founder and president of the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights in Warsaw, has been the UN-appointed ombudsman of Kosovo since 2000. Jackson Allers contributed to the writing of this column.

George A. Papandreou, leader of PASOK and former foreign minister of Greece, was recently elected President of the Socialist International.

Vladimer Papava is a former Minister of Economy of the Republic of Georgia, and is the author of Necroeconomics, a study of post-Communist economic problems.

Edmund S. Phelps is Professor of Political Economy and Director of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University.

Rick van der Ploeg is Professor of Economics at the European Institute in Florence and a member of the World Heritage Committee of UNESCO.

William Powers is the author of Blue Clay People and a forthcoming book on Bolivia.

Fidel Valdez Ramos was President of the Philippines and is currently chairman of the Ramos Peace and Development Foundation and the Boao Forum for Asia.

Rodrigo de Rato is Managing Director of the IMF.

David Rieff is the author of At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention and the acclaimed A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis.

Michel Rocard, a former Prime Minister of France and leader of the Socialist Party, is a member of the European Parliament

Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist of the IMF, is Professor of Economics at Harvard University.

Barry Rubin is director of the GLORIA Center at Israel's Interdisciplinary University and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA). His latest book is The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East.

Donald Rumsfeld is US Secretary of Defense.

Saad Eddin Ibrahim is a Professor of Political Sociology at the American University in Cairo and Chairman of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies.

Jeffrey Sachs is Professor of Economics and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

Jean-Michel Severino is the CEO of France's international development agency, the Agence Française de Développement (jms@afd.fr).

Katherine Sierra is Vice President for Infrastructure at the World Bank

Robert J. Shiller is Professor of Economics at Yale University, Director at Macro Securities Research LLC, and author of Irrational Exuberance and The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century.

Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University.

Pritam Singh is a Research Associate at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), Singapore.

Hans-Werner Sinn Professor of Economics and Public Finance, University of Munich and President of the Ifo Institute.

Aleksander Smolar is President of the Stefan Batory Foundation in Warsaw and Senior Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris.

Luigi Spaventa is Professor of Economics at the University of Rome and former chairman of Consob, the Italian securities commission

Jürgen Stark, currently Vice President of the Deutsche Bundesbank, has been nominated to join the board of the European Central Bank later this month.

Frederick Starr is chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington

Alfred Stepan is Professor of Government at Columbia University and a specialist in Comparative Democracy.

Ezra Suleiman is the Director of the European Studies Program at Princeton University and the author of many books on France.

Guido Tabellini is Professor of Economics at Bocconi University, Milan.

Philip E. Tetlock, author of Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, is Professor of Business Administration, Political Science, and Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley.

Kenneth R. Timmerman, author of Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran, is President of the Middle East Data Project.

Tzvetan Todorov, Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, is the author most recently of Hope and Memory.

Yuliya Tymoshenko was Prime Minister of Ukraine February to September, 2005.

Charles Wyplosz is Professor of International Economics and Director of the International Centre for Money and Banking Studies at the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva.

Salomé Zourabichvili is a former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Georgia, and the leader of one of Georgia's opposition parties