Aline Abboud is a Berlin-born journalist and broadcaster. She studied Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Leipzig. She worked at the German parliament as well as several national German newspapers, radio stations and television networks. She reported for Reuters from Ramallah and Gaza, before joining the German public-service broadcaster ZDF in 2016 as an editor and a news anchor. Since April 2019, Aline has co-hosted a political programme on YouTube and Facebook targeted at under-30s, called DIE DA OBEN!, produced by funk, the German content network of ARD and ZDF. She hosts the Middle East Podcast of zenith Magazine. Since 2021 Aline joined the team of anchors of the evening news show Tagesthemen at the public-service television channel ARD.

Moritz Behrendt is a German broadcast and print journalist. His work has featured in major German-language newspapers such as Süddeutsche Zeitung and Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and since 2006 he can be heard on Deutschlandfunk and Deutschlandradio Kultur. Before becoming a journalist, he studied history and journalism in Hamburg, Dakar and Beirut. Moritz is particularly interested in how collective and personal memory shape the way societies in the Middle East and in Africa envision the future. With this in mind, in 2013 he helped launch the interdisciplinary project Muwajahat al-Madi (Confronted Past) which focused on life in Egypt and Tunisia after the revolutions of 2011.

Asiem El Difraoui, born in 1965, is a German-Egyptian political scientist, economist, award-winning documentary film maker and book author. After studying at the American University in Cairo, he received his BA Honours in Economics and Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London. He obtained a M. Phil. in 1992 with a thesis on Islamism and Democracy at Sciences Po (IEP) in Paris. He also obtained hist PhD under the supervision of Gilles Kepel at Sciences Po. His dissertation "Al-Qaida par l'image: La prophétie du martyre". Was published as an acclaimed book in 2012. During is PhD Asiem El Difraoui taught at the Sciences Po in Paris and he worked as a researcher at the Middle East and Africa Research Group in the German Foundation for Science and Politics in Berlin. Since 2012 he is a Senior Fellow at the Berlin Institute for Media and Communication Policy.In 2014, he co-founded the Candid Foundation in Berlin together with Daniel Gerlach, and he is also co-editor of the magazine "zenith" published by the Foundation. Both his books, “Le Jihadisme” (2016) as well as “Die Hydra des Dschihadismus” (The Hydra of Jihadism, 2021) are regarded as standard books and introductions into Islamism. Asiem El Difraoui has worked on numerous de-radicalization projects and initiatives and has consulted several French and German ministries regarding geopolitics and civil society projects in the broader region.

Daniel Gerlach is a German Middle East expert, author and political analyst with a specialism in Middle Eastern history and current affairs. In addition to his work as the Candid Foundation’s director general, he is the editor-in-chief of zenith Magazine, co-chairman of the research and consultancy group zenithCouncil, and co-founder of the Deutscher Levante Verlag GmbH. Daniel frequently appears as a guest analyst on international news broadcasts. He has written, directed and hosted numerous documentaries on the Middle East, for which he was recognized with the National German Television Award in 2013. Daniel studied history and Middle Eastern studies at the universities of Hamburg and Paris IV Sorbonne. In 2019 he was a Poynter fellow at Yale University. In March 2019, Daniel published the book “Der Nahe Osten geht nicht unter” (The Middle East Is Not Going South) by Edition Körber. His latest book “Die Geheimnisse des Orients” was published by Bertelsmann Random House in 2022. Currently, Daniel oversees the Candid Foundation’s dialogue and mediation activities and serves as an advisor to the Iraqi National Dialogue Initiative.

Christian H. Meier is a German journalist. In 2016 he became a political editor of the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung focusing on content from the Middle East. He has also worked at Süddeutsche Zeitung, Deutsche Presse-Agentur and ARD. As well as pursuing research on cultural integration at the Cluster of Excellence in Konstanz, he has studied Islamic studies and history in Munich, Hamburg, Cairo and Tunis. Christian specialises in the development of Islamic thought, contemporary Egypt and Christian communities in the Middle East. Since 2021 Christian serves as the newspaper’s foreign correspondent covering Israel, Palestine and the Horn of Africa region.

Marcel Mettelsiefen is a photojournalist and documentary filmmaker. Having interrupted his medical studies to extensively cover Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti, his work has most recently focused on Syria. His reports from the country have featured on ARD, ZDF, Channel 4, CNN, Al Jazeera and Canal+. His film, The Agony of Aleppo’s Children, was awarded TV News Story of the Year by the London Foreign Press Association in 2013. Marcel received the Hanns-Joachim-Friedrichs-Preis for outstanding journalism and the Cinema for Peace Award in 2014, as well as two International Emmy Awards and prizes from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA). In 2017, Marcel's Syria documentary Watani was nominated for the Academy Awards (Oscars) in the category documentary short. Marcel is the Co-Director of the Netflix-production “In her Hands”, a documentary portraying Zarifa Ghafari, one of Afghanistan’s leading feminist activists.

Dr. Inna Rudolf is a Senior Research Fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) and a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Divided Societies. Within the XCEPT consortium, she is analysing the implications of identity politics and the mobilisation of violent memories in conflict-affected borderlands. As part of her PhD thesis at the War Studies Department of King’s College London, Rudolf focused the hybridization of security sector governance, examining Iraq’s paramilitary umbrella – the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) – and their quest for legitimacy within the state. She received her master’s degree in political science and Islamic studies in 2012 at the University of Heidelberg, specialising in Conflict Resolution, Peace Building and Political Islam. In addition to her field work in Iraq, she lived in Libya, Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia and Palestine for several years. Prior to joining the research team at ICSR, she represented the BMW Foundation in the Middle East and North Africa region. She is also a partner at the Candid Foundation – an independent Berlin based think tank working on political, social and cultural challenges facing Muslim communities in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and beyond.

A political scientist by training, Leo Wigger specializes in political and religious movements, migration, security in South and Central Asia (including the South Caucasus), where he has undertaken extensive fieldwork. Leo is also researching the interplay between sports, politics, and identity with a specific focus on football. He is a regular contributor to zenith magazine and previously worked as a trainee speechwriter for the president of the European Parliament. He is a Raisina Young Leader 2023 by the Observer Research Foundation (New-Delhi) and ZEIT-Stiftung. In 2022, Leo co-authored the book "Katar 2022, so eine WM gab es noch nie" a primer on the politics surrounding the Football World Cup in Qatar.

Among the co-founders of Candid Foundation gGmbH are Belabbes Benkredda, a Yale World Fellow the founding director of The Munathara Initiative, the Arab world’s largest debate organisation, and Jörg Schäffer, a Berlin-based entrepreneur and social innovator who also served as one of the Candid Foundation’s directors until 2020. Benkredda and Schäffer were associates of the Candid Foundation until 2021.

The Candid Foundation’s co-founder Katja Brinkmann (1969-2017) worked as a freelance academic tourism guide and program development advisor. During this time she spent time extensively travelling throughout the Arab world. Her experiences of Syria can be found in her guidebook published in March 2011 by Trescher. From 2010, she researched the argumentation and rhetorical devices of Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, whose writings are quoted as a reference by modern Salafi and Jihadist ideologists. Having previously studied in Berlin and Cairo, her PhD thesis on the topic was accepted cum laude by the Free University of Berlin in 2016. On 1 September 2017, Katja Brinkmann sadly passed away and will be remembered as a dear friend, devoted colleague and fellow co-founder.