Odd Arne Westad is convenor of the Department of International History at LSE and director of the Cold War Studies Centre. He served for eight years as Director of Research at the Norwegian Nobel Institute. He has written or edited a large number of books on contemporary international history, the most recent of which are The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (2005); Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946-1950 (2003) and, with Jussi Hanhimaki, The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts (2003). In 2000, he was awarded the Bernath Lecture Prize from the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations. He is a founding editor of the journal Cold War History.

Sophie Quinn-Judge is currently Associate Director of the Center for Vietnamese Philosophy, Culture and Society at Temple University. She is the author of Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years (2002).