Ludger Kuehnhardt was born in Muenster (Germany) in 1958. He is Director of the Center for European Integration Studies (ZEI), a think-tank of the University of Bonn which he helped to set up since 1997(www.zei.de). Prior to this, he was Chair of Political Science at the University of Freiburg and worked as Speechwriter for the former German President Richard von Weizsaecker. Ludger Kuehnhardt has been a Visiting Fellow ot Stanford's Hoover Institution in 1995/96. He was a Public-Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington D.C. in 2002 and a Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College in 2000. He is a Visiting Professor at the Catholic University of Milan and at the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna.

Prof. Kuehnhardts research interests center on transatlantic relations and European foreign and security policy in light of the joint new challenges in the Greater Middle East. He is also conducting research on the constitution-building process of the European Union and its ramification for European identity. His research interests include the "globalization" of regional integration processes and its link to the European integration experience.

He has wide range experiences in political and academic consulting work and has lectured in all continents. He studied history, philosophy and political science in Bonn, Geneva, Tokyo and at Harvard's Center for European Studies.

Ludger Kuehnhardt is the author of more than twenty books on Europe, transatlantic relations,political theory and history of ideas.

Romain Wacziarg is an associate professor of economics at UCLA's Anderson School of Management. Previously, he was associate professor of economics at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. An expert on international political economy, he has focused mainly on international trade and its relationship with economic development. Most recently, he has published research on the relationship between openness to trade and economic growth, as well as on the effect of an open world-trade regime on incentives for geographic regions to secede. His other areas of recent focus include a study linking ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity with economic variables; a study evaluating the economic costs and benefits of political borders; and two studies evaluating the relationship between international trade and the rise and fall of industries.

Wacziarg is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a faculty fellow at the Stanford Center for International Development, and he was a national fellow at the Hoover Institution in 2002-2003. He grew up in India and France and has worked as a consultant to the World Bank. He received his undergraduate degree from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, an MA from the University of Paris-Dauphine and a PhD in Economics from Harvard University.

David Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science and a co-director of the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford. He has conducted field research in Somalia, Nigeria, Spain, Estonia and France. His principal research interest is on how culture – specifically, language and religion – guides political behavior. He is the author of “Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-heritage Societies” and a series of articles on immigrant integration, civil war and terrorism. Laitin received his BA from Swarthmore College and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.