Candace Rondeaux is a geopolitical risk analyst, investigative journalist, and the 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 that tracks hidden geopolitical dynamics. She is also co-editor of Understanding the New Proxy Wars (Hurst-Oxford University Press, 2022).

Rondeaux is a Visiting Researcher MERCURY project ("Mercenarism and the Accountability Void") at the University of Copenhagen’s Centre for Private Governance in the Faculty of Law. A Senior Fellow with the Future Security Initiative at New America, she is also a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University, where she teaches courses in irregular warfare and open-source intelligence. She writes a regular column for World Politics Review and frequently contributes to the Financial Times on international security, geopolitical risk, and the political-economy of emerging technologies.

An award-winning journalist, she served as the Afghanistan and Pakistan Bureau Chief for the Washington Post, where she was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that covered the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre. Her reporting career began on the crime and courts beat — she reported from Ground Zero after the September 11 attacks for the New York Daily News and chronicled the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina for the St. Petersburg Times. Her analysis and commentary have appeared in the Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BBC World, Times Radio, The Daily Beast, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, Lawfare, Small Wars Journal, and Just Security.

Before founding Frontline Atlas, she served as Senior Director for the Future Frontlines and Planetary Politics programs at New America, where she built flagship research programs at the intersection of irregular warfare, political violence, and geostrategic competition, and directed cross-disciplinary work on the geopolitics of decarbonization, digitalization, and the governance challenges posed by rapid technological change in a multipolar world. Earlier, she served as a Senior Program Officer at the U.S. Institute of Peace, where she led the RESOLVE Network, a global research consortium on countering violent extremism. As a Senior Analyst for the International Crisis Group based in Afghanistan and a Strategic Adviser to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, she produced analysis on national elections, judicial reform, and the security sector.

She has testified before Congress and provided expert advice to NATO and several UN panels and commissions on conflict, the protection of civilians, transnational organized crime, and the outsourcing of violence. She has documented political violence and conflicts in hotspots around the world, including Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Georgia, Pakistan, and Ukraine.

She holds a B.A. in Russian Area Studies from Sarah Lawrence College, an M.A. in Journalism from NYU, and an M.P.P./M.P.A. from Princeton University.