Alessandro Marrone is Head of IAI "Defence, security and space" programme. He has been working at IAI since 2007, and currently manages research projects and publications related to European and transatlantic security as well as to Italy’s defence policy. Since 2018 he is also Professor at the Istituto Superiore di Stato Maggiore Interforze of the Italian Ministry of Defence, after four years of teaching at the University of Perugia. He has been mentor at the NATO Defence College, and since 2016 is member of the Scientific Board of the Armament Industry European Research Group (ARES Group).
He holds a PhD in History of Europe from the La Sapienza University of Rome and a Master of Science (MSc) in International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Previously he got a Bachelor degree in Political Science and MSc in International Relations from the LUISS Guido Carli.
He is a member of the Editorial Board of IAI web-magazine AffarInternazionali and collaborates with several Italian magazines including Airpress, Aspenia, Eastwest, Formiche, Huffington Post, Rivista Italiana Difesa and Rivista marittima. He frequently appears on national television, radio and newspapers in relation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and other international security issues.
He is interested in armed conflicts, European defence, NATO, Italian defence and foreign policy, defence industry and market, space, security in the Mediterranean region.

Giovanni Faleg was associate fellow at the Istituto Affari Internazionali, where he contributed to a research project on the EU's role in conflict transformation through the promotion of regional integration. Giovanni holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics (European Institute). He is currently a consultant at the World Bank Institute and a research fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) and the Johns Hopkins University SAIS Center for Transatlantic Relations. On a theoretical level, his research agenda focuses on institutional learning theories and the role of epistemic communities and communities of practice in IR.

Riccardo Alcaro is Research Coordinator and Head of the Global Actors Programme at the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI). His main area of expertise is transatlantic relations, with a particular focus on US and European policies towards Europe’s surrounding regions. He has been a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and a fellow of the EU-wide programme European Foreign and Security Policy Studies (EFSPS). He has coordinated the EU-funded TRANSWORLD project on transatlantic relations and global governance (7th Framework Programme) and the JOINT project on EU foreign and security policy (Horizon 2020). Riccardo is the author of Europe and Iran’s Nuclear Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and co-author, with Pol Bargués, of Conflict Management and the Future of EU Foreign and Security Policy: Relational Power Europe (Routledge, 2025). He also edited The Liberal Order and its Contestations (Routledge, 2018). He holds a summa cum laude PhD from the University of Tübingen.