Born in France, François Bizot has spent the greater part of his career living and working as an ethnologist in Cambodia and South-East Asia. In France, he became a postgraduate director of studies at the prestigious École Pratique des hautes  études in Paris. Today, he is Emeritus Professor at the École française d'Extrême-Orient and lives on the outskirts of Paris. He has published various academic studies of Buddhism as well as The Gate, an account of his capture by the Khmer Rouge in 1971.

Eric Stover is Faculty Director of the Human Rights Center and Adjunct Professor of Law and Public Health, University of California at Berkeley. He has served on several forensic missions to investigate mass graves in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda for the International Criminal Tribunals. In the early 1990s, Stover conducted the first research on the social and medical consequences of land mines in Cambodia and other post-war countries. His research helped launch the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, which received the Nobel Prize in 1997. He has published six books, including The Witnesses: War Crimes and the Promises of Justice in The Hague.