Episode 5 - The Israel - Hamas war: architecture of diplomacy

Daniel Byman is a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, director of the Security Studies Program there, and a Senior Fellow with the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Byman is also Foreign Policy Editor for Lawfare and a part-time Senior Advisor to the Department of State as part of the International Security Advisory Board. In addition to serving as Vice Dean for the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, he was a senior fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, a Professional Staff Member with both the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States (“The 9-11 Commission”) and the Joint 9/11 Inquiry Staff of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, the Research Director of the Center for Middle East Public Policy at the RAND Corporation, and as an analyst of the Middle East for the U.S. intelligence community.  

Dr. Byman has written widely on topics related to terrorism, insurgency, intelligence, social media, artificial intelligence, and the Middle East. He is the author of nine books, and his most recent is Spreading Hate: The White Power Movement Goes Global (Oxford, 2022). He is author or co-author of almost 200 academic and policy articles, monographs, and book chapters as well as numerous opinion pieces in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and other leading journals.   

Thomas Fletcher is Principal of Hertford College, Oxford University. He was previously Foreign Policy Adviser to three UK Prime Ministers (2007-11) and the United Kingdom’s Ambassador to Lebanon (2011-15). More recently, he was a Visiting Professor at New York University (2015-20), advised the Global Business Coalition for Education, and chaired the International Advisory Council of the Creative Industries Federation. In 2018, he founded The Foundation for Opportunity which supports good people doing good things in public life.

Fletcher has published four books. The Naked Diplomat: Power and Politics in the Digital Age’ (Harper Collins, June 2016), Ten Survival Skills for a World in Flux (Harper Collins, February 2022), The Ambassador (Canelo, August 2022) and The Assassin (Canelo, 2024). He presented the BBC series ‘The Battle for Liberal Democracy’ (2023), led a review of British diplomacy for the UK Foreign Office in 2016, and on the future of the United Nations for the UN Secretary General.

Julie Trottier is director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France, and adjunct lecturer at Sciences Po Paris, in the Master’s program on Environmental Policy. She served as a consultant to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization water governance program from 2020 to 2022. She co-authored a proposal for an Israeli-Palestinian water accord, acting for Friends of the Earth Middle East within their contract with the Geneva Initiative.  

Over the past 29 years, her research has focused on the social and political aspects of scientific discourse and technological choices concerning water, including, in particular, water in the Palestinian territories.   Following a PhD in political science at Louvain, Belgium, and a post-doc at McGill University, Canada, she became a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford, UK, and lectured at Newcastle University, UK. She has undertaken research in Jerusalem in 1998-1999, and 2012-2018.  

Steve Paikin is the host of TVO's flagship current affairs program The Agenda with Steve Paikin He co-hosts the weekly provincial affairs #onpoli podcast and contributes weekly columns to tvo.org. He is an officer of the Order of Canada and a member of the Order of Ontario