Marcela Turati is the co-founder of the Mexican investigative journalism nonprofit Quinto Elemento Lab and the website Where Do the Disappeared Go? Turati is renowned for her investigations into missing people, enforced disappearances, massacres of migrants, and mass graves.

Caleb Okereke is the Co-Founder and Managing Editor at Minority Africa, a digital publication telling minority stories across Africa that is supported by Google News Initiative and NED. He's reported across Africa for CNN, DW, Aljazeera, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, and VICE News and has worked as an Editor with the New African Magazine. He was previously a Heidi news correspondent in East Africa based out of Kampala, Uganda and has worked as a consultant with Mozilla for the Pocket App.

At the FT, Dave Lee primarily covers ecommerce and the gig economy. His main companies of interest are Amazon, Uber and Airbnb. He is also a regular contributor to FT Magazine, where he writes about societal impacts of new technologies.

Narasimhan Ram is an award-winning Indian political journalist, specialising in investigative journalism. The former editor-in-chief of The Hindu, chairman and publisher of of The Hindu Publishing Group, he is now its Managing Director.

"Jane Bradley is an investigative reporter covering the United Kingdom for The New York Times. She is based in London, where she focuses on uncovering abuses of power, financial crime and corruption, and social injustices.

Prior to joining The Times in 2020, Jane spent 10 years at the BBC where she became one of its youngest senior broadcast journalists and worked on the flagship investigative program, Panorama, before joining BuzzFeed UK's investigations team in 2015.

Why did the Iraqi regime fail to demonstrate it no longer had WMD prior to the 2003 invasion? For the past twenty years, there has been surprisingly little debate about this key question. In this seminar I draw on primary sources that I have collected from Iraqi sources and the United Nations inspectors investigating Iraqi WMD disarmament between the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion. Drawing on this new evidence, I argue that two factors were vital in shaping Iraqi WMD disclosures during the 2002-2003 period.

The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 created a seismic shift in clerical-state relations. For decades, the Shia religious establishment had a contentious relationship with the Iraqi state, who feared their mobilization capacity and persecuted them as a result. After 2003, the Shia religious leadership played a powerful role in political affairs, guiding the country towards a constitutional referendum, earlier-than-planned elections, and intervening in critical moments to stem the flow of violence and to uphold order and stability.

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Abstract: How did the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 affect the evolution of the transnational jihadi movement? The consensus view since the mid-2000s has been that the war fuelled militant Islamism, but there have since been few attempts to specify the effects and identify the mechanisms involved. In this talk I draw on a wide range of unexploited quantitative and qualitative evidence to understand the war's impact on transnational militancy.

Biograph: