Charles Dunst is the author of Defeating the Dictators: How Democracy Can Prevail in the Age of the Strongman (Feb. 2023) – a Financial Times Best Book of the Week described as "bursting with statistics and lots of common sense" (The Guardian), "creative and thought-provoking" (Foreign Policy), and "important" (The Observer). 

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He has been deputy director of research & analytics at The Asia Group, an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and an associate for Global Macro at Eurasia Group. 

 

He began his career as a foreign correspondent reporting from Southeast Asia – and later from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. ​He has reported from Cambodia, Hungary, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Myanmar, Oman, Romania, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam.

 

He has written for outlets including The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, NPR, and CNN, and published his photography in many of these same outlets. He has appeared on BBC News, ABC News, Bloomberg, and TV Tokyo. 

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Dunst has an​ M.Sc. with Distinction in International Relations from the London School of Economics and a B.A. with honors from Hamilton College.