Michelle Bentley is Reader in International Relations and Director of the Centre for International Security at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. She has written two monographs: Weapons of Mass Destruction and US Foreign Policy: The Strategic Use of a Concept (2014) and Syria and the Chemical Weapons Taboo: Exploiting the Forbidden (2016).

Adam B. Lerner, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is also Deputy Director of Royal Holloway's Centre for International Security (RHISC). His first book, From the Ashes of History: Collective Trauma and the Making of International Politics, was published in 2022.