Phil Williams is Professor Emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs and former long-term director of the Matthew B. Ridgway Center for International Security Studies. He is one of the world's foremost experts in transnational organized crime and money laundering and has published extensively in the field of international security. During the last 29 years, his research has focused primarily on transnational organized crime and he has written on this in Survival, Washington Quarterly, The Bulletin on Narcotics, Scientific American, Crime Law and Social Change, and International Peacekeeping. In addition, Dr. Williams was the founding editor of a journal entitled Transnational Organized Crime and has edited several volumes on combating organized crime, Russian organized crime, and trafficking in women.

He has been a consultant to both the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime and United States government agencies and has also given congressional testimony on organized crime. Dr. Williams spent a sabbatical at CERT where he worked on intelligence analysis for cyber-threats and financial cyber-crime. More recently, he has worked more recently on terrorist finances, ungoverned spaces, and drug trafficking through West Africa.

His work includes a monograph on The New Dark Age: The Decline of the State and U.S. Strategy and another one, published in August 2009 entitled Criminals, Militias, and Insurgents: Organized Crime in Iraq. Dr. Williams has contributed three chapters to Fighting Back, an edited volume on terrorism published by Stanford University Press, has published an article on Mexican drug violence in a special issue of Terrorism and Political Violence, and a chapter on Nigerian organized crime in the Oxford Handbook of Organized Crime. He produced an edited volume with Dr. Dighton Fiddner on Cyberspace: Malevolent Actors, Criminal Opportunities, and Strategic Opportunities. His latest work is an edited volume with Drs. Michael Glass and Taylor Seybolt entitled Urban Violence, Resilience and Security: Governance Responses in the Global South.