Paul Bacon has been a Professor of International Relations in the Faculty of International Research and Education at Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, for twenty years. His areas of research expertise include the EU as an Indo-Pacific actor, and the geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific. He has authored or co-authored more than forty refereed publications, including five Routledge research monographs, and articles in leading and respected journals such as International Affairs, Journal of Common Market Studies, Pacific Review, Asian Security and International Relations of the Asia-Pacific. He is the Secretary and co-founder of the General Expert Standing Group on EU-Japan Relations and has been involved in numerous EU and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) research projects, including four Jean Monnet Networks, and two Marie Sk¿odowska-Curie projects. He has also received targeted funding for professionally commissioned project research from the European Commission, NATO, and the foreign ministries of Germany, Norway and the UK.

Matthew Gray is a professor at the School of International Liberal Studies (SILS), Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, where his teaching and research focus on the politics, political economy, and international relations of the modern Middle East. Prior to taking up this position in September 2016, he was based at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australia from 2005 to 2016, and also worked in various roles across trade, defence, and immigration with the Australian government from 1997 to 2005. He is the author of four books on the contemporary Middle East: Conspiracy Theories in the Middle East: Sources and Politics (Routledge, 2010), Qatar: Politics and the Challenges of Development (Lynne Rienner, 2013), Global Security Watch - Saudi Arabia (Praeger, 2014) and The Economies of the Gulf States (Agenda, 2019). He is also the author of more than thirty refereed journal articles, book chapters and conference papers, and propounded the influential theory of 'late rentierism' in Middle Eastern studies.