The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade

Kathi Austin is the executive director of Conflict Awareness Project, an international NGO with the mission to investigate, document and bring to justice arms traffickers, war profiteers, and transnational criminal networks that fuel war and conflict around the world. Austin formerly served with the United Nations Group of Experts on the DRC and Liberia as well as Chief of the Joint Mission Analysis Centre for the United Nations Peacekeeping Missions in Timor-Leste and Burundi. She continues to consult as an expert with NGOs, multi-lateral organizations and the media, and has a forthcoming memoir to be published by Random House on her twenty-year experience tracking arms traffickers.

Jeff Abramson is coordinator of Control Arms Secretariat, a global civil society alliance campaigning for a “bulletproof” Arms Trade Treaty that will protect lives and livelihoods. Previously, he served as deputy director of the Arms Control Association and managing editor of Arms Control Today.

Andrew Feinstein is the author of The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. As a South African parliamentarian, Feinstein investigated and exposed a massive and corrupt arms deal that implicated top government officials. He is currently creating a web-based resource on the global arms trade for use by civil society groups, watchdogs, elected representatives, activists, and journalists.

Elected to parliament as a member of the African National Congress in 1994, Feinstein served on the committee on public accounts. In that role, he attempted to investigate the involvement by senior government and party officials in the largest corruption scandal in the nation’s history. Forced by his senior colleagues in the party to resign his seat, Feinstein now lives in London, where he works as a campaigner, writer, and advisor to corruption investigations. He is a founder of Corruption Watch, whose mission is to monitor and expose corporate bribery and its impacts on governance, democracy, and development.

He is the author of the best-selling political memoir After the Party: Corruption, the ANC and South Africa's Uncertain Future.

Stephen Hubbell is senior public affairs officer for the Open Society Fellowship Program. He consults closely with fellows to develop media strategies to broaden public awareness of their work and to integrate fellows into the global Open Society community. 

Hubbell joined the Open Society Foundations after 20 years as a journalist and editor. He has worked as a senior editor at Metropolitan Books and at Harper's, where he edited the work of many notable writers, including Anne Fadiman, Harold Brodkey, Elliott Currie, Marilynne Robinson, Alan Weisman, Arlie Hochschild, and Edward Fox. He has also served as Middle East correspondent for The Nation, for whom he covered the first Gulf War and the rise of political Islam.

He received his bachelor's degree in government from Wesleyan University.