Akhmed Zakaev is the Prime Minister in Exile of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria (CRI). He was born in 1959 into a family deported, along with the rest of the Chechen population, by Stalin’s regime in 1944. Zakaev graduated from acting and choreography schools in Grozny. In 1977, he was admitted to Voronezh State Academy of Arts and subsequently worked at the Chechen National Theatre. In 1994 he became Minister of Culture of the independent Chechen government of Djohar Dudaev and Commander of the Western Group for the Defense of Ichkeria. Zakaev played a crucial role in negotiations with Moscow, which led to the Russo-Chechen peace treaty of 1997, which Russia later violated. He opposed the rise of radical Islam in Chechnya, alleging a link between Islamist extremism and Russia’s covert global pro-terrorism policy. In 2002, Russia accused Zakaev, by then in exile, of involvement in a series of crimes, including the hostage-taking at a Moscow theatre in 2002 which ended in a catastrophic loss of life. In 2003, a British court declared the accusations groundless and politically motivated. On February 25, 2022, the second day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Zakaev issued a statement at a rally in defense of Ukraine before the European Parliament in Brussels. Zakaev has spoken in the European Parliament and the legislatures of Italy, Lithuania, Romania, and other countries. He is the author of Subjugate or Exterminate! (Academica Press, 2018) and Russia, Chechnya, and the West (Academica Press, 2022).

Translator: Arch Tait learned Russian in London and at Moscow State University. He holds a Ph.D. in Russian Literature from the University of Cambridge and from 1993 was UK editor of the Glas New Russian Writing translation series. He has translated more than forty books by leading Russian authors of fiction and non-fiction, including Alexei Navalny’s Patriot, which was voted Book of the Year at the 2025 British Book Awards and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography in the United States. He has translated books by Nobel Prize winners Mikhail Gorbachev and Svetlana Alexiyevich, as well as the first two volumes of the memoirs of Akhmed Zakaev.

Kankana Pal completed her doctoral research at Savitribai Phule Pune University in Pune, India. She is currently affiliated with a teachers’ training college in Kolkata, where she is engaged in both teaching and academic research. Her primary area of scholarly interest is the integration of technology in school curricula, with a special focus on arts education. Dr. Pal has published research articles in numerous scholarly journals, including work examining the implications of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in school curriculum design. Her academic work reflects a strong commitment to advancing innovative pedagogical practices and strengthening the role of digital technologies in contemporary education.

Jayme A. Sokolow is an independent scholar and businessman who holds a Ph.D. in History from New York University. He is the author of four previous books on American history and the history of the Western Hemisphere, three eBooks on developing government proposals, and articles on history and business development. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Dr. Kawal Deep Kour holds a Ph.D. from IIT Guwahati and is a former civil servant (Assam Civil Services). She is currently Director at the SA–Drugs and Addictions Research Council, New Delhi. Dr. Kour served on the Board of the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy (ISSDP), UK (2017–2022), and was nominated in 2023 to the Network of Experts of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC). A prolific author, she has several publications to her credit, including Ghazipur, The Opium Mint: From 1820 to the Present (Academica Press, 2023) and Opium Consumption and Experience in India: From the Earliest to Contemporary Times (Academica Press, 2023).

Niccolo Caldararo grew up in Castro Valley of California, where his maternal family had a farm. He attended public schools and graduated from the University of California Berkeley and San Francisco State University with a B.A. and M.A. in anthropology before taking his Ph.D. in developmental psychology. After graduation, he was hired at the California Academy of Science as a research assistant to care for its anthropology and archaeology collections. His position at the California Academy of Sciences allowed him to study a wide variety of animals and fossils. Caldararo continued his museum career at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. His museum work was punctuated by reports of laboratory work in various scientific journals. Since 1995, he has taught at SFSU and the City College of San Francisco. Caldararo has written 117 articles, several book chapters, a dozen field ethnographies, and eight books, including The Future of Leisure and Retirement: Pension Schemes, Community Support, and Contemporary Consequences for the Next Generation (Academica Press, 2021).

Ambassador Michael Gfoeller is a distinguished American diplomat, scholar, and innovative thinker with a 26-year Foreign Service career (1984–2010). Serving in Warsaw during the Cold War’s end, as well as in Moscow, Riyadh, Manama, and as Deputy Chief of Mission in Saudi Arabia (2004–2008), he navigated complex political dynamics in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. As Senior Political Advisor to General David Petraeus at U.S. Central Command (2008–2010), he shaped Middle East and Central Asia strategies. After his retirement, Gfoeller advised ExxonMobil, consulted for Henry Kissinger, and lectured at Georgetown University. An accomplished scholar, he authored books on the traditional architecture and antiquities of Armenia, where he established an archeological foundation and museum. His recent book Consciousness is Curvature (Academica Press, 2025) models human and artificial intelligence as dynamic geometric curvature in informational spaces, inspired by relativity and quantum theory. In Faster Than Light (Academica Press, 2026), he explores how recent advances in theoretical physics can enable feasible interstellar travel, inaugurating a new Age of Exploration that may never end. In Resonant Memory (Academica Press, 2026), he proposes mathematical laws of history based upon the theory of morphic resonance, the mathematics of Quantum Field Theory, and the concept of three-dimensional time.

Dr. Kawal Deep Kour holds a Ph.D. from IIT Guwahati and is a former civil servant (Assam Civil Services). She is currently Director at the SA–Drugs and Addictions Research Council, New Delhi. Dr. Kour served on the Board of the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy (ISSDP), UK (2017–2022), and was nominated in 2023 to the Network of Experts of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC). A prolific author, she has several publications to her credit, including Ghazipur, The Opium Mint: From 1820 to the Present (Academica Press, 2023) and Opium Consumption and Experience in India: From the Earliest to Contemporary Times (Academica Press, 2023).

Nicholas H. Wolfinger is Professor of Family and Consumer Studies and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of Utah, where he has taught since 1998. He is the author of four books, most recently Thanks for Nothing: The Economics of Single Motherhood since 1980 (Oxford University Press, 2024). In 2025, Wolfinger edited Professors Speak Out: The Truth About Campus Investigations (Academica Press, 2025), a groundbreaking anthology of accounts by faculty members who told of their investigations by campus authorities. Wolfinger’s work has appeared in the Atlantic, Mother Jones, National Review, and various academic journals. Between 2016 and 2021, his university investigated him three times.

Suheyb Öğüt was born in Mecca in 1982. He studied Political Science at Istanbul Bilgi University and completed there a Cultural Studies M.A. program he had begun at Sabancı University with a thesis titled Pornography and Veiling: Two Differentials of Sovereignty. Following sustained mobbing at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, he withdrew from the Sociology Ph.D. program there and transferred to Yıldırım Beyazıt University, where he completed his doctoral dissertation, Leviathan as the Symptom of Being. His doctoral dissertation was published by Academica Press under the title Being and Symptom: The Intersection of Sociology, Lacanian Psychoanalysis, and Continental Philosophy. During his doctoral studies, he also received a classical theology education. For nearly ten years, he has given seminars on philosophy, sociology, psychoanalysis, and film analysis for various civil society organizations. He is currently a faculty member in the Department of Sociology at Marmara University in Istanbul.

Khadija Muhammad Hussain Marvi is an M.Phil. graduate of the National University of Modern Languages in Islamabad, Pakistan. She has authored multiple articles on education and is currently pursuing her Ph.D. She earned a master’s degree from Hamdard University and her bachelor’s degree from Rana Liaquat Ali Khan Government College of Home Economics. Khadija Marvi’s work has been featured in the American Journal of Education and Practice, Creative Education, the International Journal of Social Science Bulletin, and Nurture Publishing Group. She has also taught as a science teacher and worked as an academic coordinator.