The World Today 2025

Adela is a big fan of the Bradford Literature Festival and has been attending for many years! She is an international breaking-news reporter for The Washington Post based in London. Previously, she has worked for NBC News, Al Jazeera English, Thomson Reuters and The Associated Press. She is a graduate of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, with a degree in Law, and Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Before pivoting to journalism, she spent four years as an international corporate lawyer in London, Dubai and Libya. Adela is interested in China and Africa and has traveled to more than 70 countries, including reporting trips to Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Jordan, the United States and much of Europe. Adela grew up in Manchester, Kent and London but also spent long stints in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, where her father was born.

Dr Becky Alexis-Martin joined academia after a successful prior career in emergency management.

Her research arises at the point where peace, science and technology, humanitarian aid, justice and human rights coalesce. Her research has tackled challenges including: modelling the behaviours of city-dwellers during nuclear events, understanding the lives of nuclear test veterans and their families, exploring the afterlives of nuclear bunkers, writing on the lived experiences of those scarred by nuclear accident and warfare, sharing the aesthetics of 1950s atomic America, and identifying the humanitarian and environmental needs of local nuclear weapons test affected communities worldwide.

Her first monograph, “Disarming Doomsday: The Human Impacts of Nuclear Warfare” was the recipient of the L.H.M. Ling Outstanding First Book Prize.

Saeed Khan is a cultural historian and commentator based at Wayne State University in Detroit, where he teaches in the departments of History and Global Studies. His academic expertise includes Islamic and Middle Eastern history, Islamic political thought, and transnational identities. Alongside his academic work, he is a frequent analyst for international media outlets. Saeed is the founder of the Center for the Study of Trans-Atlantic Diasporas, a policy institute focused on ethnic and immigrant communities in North America and Europe.

Paul Rogers is Emeritus Professor of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford, and an Honorary Fellow of the UK Defence Academy. He is a biologist by original training, lecturing at Imperial College and also working in tropical crop research in East Africa. From later lecturing in environmental science, he moved to Bradford in 1979 and has worked primarily on the changing causes of international conflict, especially in relation to political violence. A fourth edition of his book, Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century, was published by Pluto Press last July.