Candace Rondeaux

Candace Rondeaux (LinkedIn) is an award-winning investigative journalist, geopolitical risk analyst, and author of Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos (PublicAffairs, 2025). She is the founding principal of Frontline Atlas, an independent public-interest intelligence platform focused on the networks, technologies, and financial interests shaping global security.

A former Washington Post Afghanistan and Pakistan bureau chief, Rondeaux has spent more than two decades investigating crime, armed conflict, political violence, intelligence operations, and the networks that sustain them. Her work combines investigative reporting, open-source intelligence, and geopolitical analysis. She was part of the Post team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre.

Rondeaux is a Professor of Practice with the Future Security Initiative at Arizona State University, where she is also affiliated with the Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies. She is a Senior Fellow at New America and a Visiting Researcher with the University of Copenhagen’s MERCURY project. She writes regularly for World Politics Review and the Financial Times and is co-editor of Understanding the New Proxy Wars (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2022).

Previously, she held senior research and advisory positions at New America, the U.S. Institute of Peace, International Crisis Group, and the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. She has testified before Congress and advised NATO and United Nations bodies on conflict, civilian protection, and the outsourcing of violence.

She holds degrees from Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, and Princeton University, and is proficient in Russian, with basic working knowledge of French.