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 also co-editor of Understanding the New Proxy Wars (Hurst-Oxford University Press, 2022).
Rondeaux is a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University, where she teaches courses in proxy warfare, open-source intelligence and security studies topics. She is a faculty affiliate of the Future Security Initiative and the Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies. She is the founder of Frontline Atlas, an independent geopolitical risk intelligence platform and writes a regular column for World Politics Review on international security and the geopolitics of energy, emerging technology and industrial transformation. She specializes in mapping how power operates across formal institutions and informal networks, from irregular warfare and sanctions evasion to global digital, financial, and industrial infrastructure.
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, Financial Times, 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 is a Senior Fellow and 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, provided expert advice to NATO, the UN, ICC and commissions on conflict, the protection of civilians, transnational organized crime, and irregular warfare. She has documented political violence and crises in hotspots around the world, including Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Georgia, Pakistan, and Ukraine. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, she holds a bachelor's in Russian area studies, master's in journalism from New York University, and a master's in public policy from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.