Johan Galtung (born 24 October 1930) is a Norwegian sociologist and the principal founder of the discipline of peace and conflict studies. He founded the Peace Research Institute Oslo in 1959, serving as its Director until 1970, and established the Journal of Peace Research in 1964. In 1969 he was appointed to the world's first chair in peace and conflict studies, at the University of Oslo. He resigned his professorship in 1977 and has since held professorships at several universities around the world. Galtung is a prolific researcher, having made contributions to many branches of sociology. He has published more than 1000 articles and over 100 books.^{[non-primary source needed]} He was awarded the Alternative Nobel Prize in 1987,^{[citation needed]} and has received many other accolades. He is currently a resident of France and the United States.^{[citation needed]}

Galtung is known for contributions to mathematics and sociology in the 1950s, political science in the 1960s, economics and history in the 1970s, macro history, anthropology and theology in the 1980s. He has developed several influential theories, such as the distinction between positive and negative peace, structural violence, theories on conflict and conflict resolution, the structural theory of imperialism, and the theory of the United States as simultaneously a republic and an empire.

Amy Goodman (born April 13, 1957) is an American progressive broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, investigative reporter and author. Goodman is the host of Democracy Now!, an independent global news program broadcast daily on radio, television and the Internet.

Goodman was born in Bay Shore, New York on April 13, 1957 to George, an ophthalmologist, and Dorothy (née Bock) Goodman, and graduated from Bay Shore High School in 1975. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1984 with a degree in anthropology. She spent a year studying at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine.

Goodman had been news director of Pacifica Radio station WBAI in New York City for over a decade when she co-founded Democracy Now! The War and Peace Report in 1996. Since then, Democracy Now! has been called "probably the most significant progressive news institution that has come around in some time" by professor and media critic Robert McChesney.

In 2001, the show was temporarily pulled off the air, as a result of a conflict with a group of Pacifica Radio board members and Pacifica staff members and listeners. During that time, it moved to a converted firehouse from which it broadcast until November 13, 2009. The new Democracy Now! studio is located in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.