Dr Bryce Wakefield is the National Executive Director of the Australian Institute of International Affairs and a visiting fellow at the Australian National University. He has lived, worked and researched in the United States, Japan, Europe and New Zealand. He trained as a political scientist with particular expertise in International Relations and the international affairs of East Asia.

From 2008 to 2012 Bryce was the associate responsible for Northeast Asian programs at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. In this role, he was responsible for conceiving, designing and organising around 60 events in Washington, including policy briefings in the U.S. Congress, on political issues in Australia, Taiwan, North and South Korea and Japan. He co-organised, with the Wilson Center’s partners, three major annual policy conferences in Tokyo. He has also given talks in Japanese, including for parliamentarians at the National Diet.

He was also a university lecturer with tenure in area studies and international relations at Leiden University in the Netherlands. While at Leiden from 2012-2018 he taught numerous classes on the foreign policy and domestic politics of Japan, the politics of East Asia, comparative politics, and the relationship between politics and culture. He designed and implemented a successful specialization on culture and politics for Leiden’s graduate program in International Relations. During his time as a university academic he also delivered training, induction and briefing sessions for Dutch and international diplomats in the Hague and in Japan.

Bryce is regularly quoted in the media. His work and views on political issues in Asia and Australasia have appeared in such outlets as the Australian Financial Review, BusinessWeek, Der Spiegel, Financial Times, SCMP, the Telegraph, de Volkskrant and the Washington Times, as well as on the ABC, ACN, SBS, BBC News, CNBC, CSPAN, 7News Australia, and Sky News Australia and in such Japanese outlets as the Daily Yomiuri, NHK and the Sankei Shimbun. In February 2015, the Tokyo bureau chief of the New York Times named him as one of 10 “influential and reliable intellectuals” outside Washington who could help policymakers better know Japan.

Bryce’s academic publications to date focus on constitutional issues and defence policy, political marketing and national identity in Japan. While at the Wilson Center, he also edited and contributed to several of the centre’s multi-author publications on East Asian politics and foreign policy. He has also written on New Zealand’s foreign policy and has been called to the Australian Senate Foreign Affairs and Defence References Select Committee to give expert testimony.

Bryce lived in Japan from 1998 to 2004 and earned his master’s degree from Osaka University’s School of International Public Policy. He earned his PhD in political studies from the University of Auckland.

Dr Kiriloi M. Ingram is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Australian Graduate School of Policing and Security at Charles Sturt University working on the Contemporary Threats to Australian Security (CTAS) project. She received her doctorate in Political Science at the University of Queensland in 2022. Her research analyses on the role of gender in non-state politically motivated violent group’s propaganda and politico-military strategies, and her thesis analysed how and why Islamic State propaganda constructs and manipulates gender to target and appeal to transnational audiences.

She has published extensively with international forums, including the International Centre for Counter Terrorism at The Hague, Lawfare, VOX-Pol, ABC Australia, and the Australian Institute for International Affairs, as well as in high ranking academic journals including ‘Terrorism and Political Violence’ and ‘Journal for Deradicalization’.



She regularly presents her research at national and international conferences to academic, government, and industry audiences such as at the Centre of Excellence for National Security Workshop of S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (Singapore), Australian Political Studies Association Conference (Australia), Terrorism and Social Media Conference (United Kingdom), and Charles Sturt University's Terrorism Masterclasses.

In 2019, Kiriloi was recognised and appointed as a Pacific Forum Young Leader, and in 2022 Kiriloi was recognised in the Top 25 Young Women to Watch in International Affairs. Kiriloi also holds a Bachelor of Arts with an extended major in Political Science from UQ, and a Bachelor of International Security Studies with Honours from the Australian National University.

Professionally, Kiriloi has supported gender sensitive peacebuilding and P/CVE programme development in Mindanao, Southern Philippines, Raqqa, Syria, Indonesia, Bangladesh. Her work aims to equip and empower local women to develop their own strategies to build meaningful peace in their local communities.