Alisher Khamidov is a journalist originally from Kyrgyzstan. From June 1998 to July 2001, he served as Director of the Osh Media Resource Center (OMRC), a nonprofit independent media association in southern Kyrgyzstan. He has also acted as the regional coordinator of the Central Asian Media Support Project. Khamidov has written a series of articles on religious and ethnic conflict in the Ferghana Valley and political developments in Kyrgyzstan and in Central Asia, and is a frequent contributor to Eurasianet and IRIN. Khamidov is pursuing his PhD in Russian and Eurasian Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University. He has previously worked at Notre Dame University's Sanctions and Security Project, the NEH Summer Institute on Eurasian Civilizations at Harvard University and at the Foreign Policy Studies Program of the Brookings Institution. Khamidov has a BA in teaching English and German from Osh State University and an MA in International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame.

David Abramson is an analyst on Central Asia in the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Previously he worked in the State Department's Office of International Religious Freedom, where he promoted religious freedom in the Muslim world and formulated U.S. policies to engage the Muslim world and outreach efforts to Muslim communities in the United States. Abramson received his doctorate in Cultural Anthropology from Indiana University where he specialized in community and conflict in post-Soviet Uzbekistan. He spent four years as a research fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies before heading to Washington. He has lectured and written on Islam and secularism in Uzbekistan, the politics of civil society assistance in Central Asia, and the role of religion in U.S. foreign policy.