Alexander Alekseev is a doctoral researcher in political science, funded by the Kone Foundation (2022 – 2024). He holds a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO-University in Russia) and a Master’s Degree in Human Rights and Humanitarian Action from the Institut d’études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po Paris in France). Before joining the University of Helsinki, he completed the doctoral programme in political science at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow (Russia).

Marzouq Alnusf is Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy at Kuwait University. His areas of specialty are social and political philosophy, philosophy of race, and modern and contemporary Arabic philosophy. He holds an MA and PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University, and an MA in economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. 

Vanda Amaro Dias is Assistant Professor in European Studies at the University of Coimbra and researcher at the Centre for Social Studies. She received her PhD in International Relations from the same institution. Currently, she is PI in the research project “CO3 - Continuous Construction of resilient social contracts through societal transformations”, member of the Executive Editorial Board of e-cadernos CES, member of the Managing Team of the International Relations Section – Portuguese Association for Political Science, and member of the UACES Research Network “Securing Europe”. Her research interests include peace/security studies, foreign policy, European Union, Russia and Eastern Europe. Institutional profile: https://ces.uc.pt/pt/ces/pessoas/investigadoras-es/vanda-amaro-dias.

Après un doctorat réalisé en cotutelle à l’Université de Padoue (en philosophie) et à Science Po (en science politique), Léa Antonicelli est actuellement postdoctorante au CEVIPOF et elle enseigne la théorie politique à Sciences Po et Paris VIII. Ses travaux de thèse ont porté sur l’analyse de la sémantique de l’inutile dans le champ politique, en faisant apparaître comment elle contribuait à définir un axiome néolibéral. Sa proposition d’intervention reprend certains de ses résultats, en particulier le chapitre conclusif qui proposait des pistes de réflexion en vue d'une réélaboration du concept d’utilité publique selon une approche féministe intersectionnelle.

Valentin Avenard est actuellement en deuxième année de doctorat, en Histoire du droit, à Nantes Université. Sa thèse, effectuée sous la co-direction de M. Thérence Carvalho et de Mme Anne-Sophie Chambost, porte sur la surveillance policière des anarchistes sous la IIIe République.

Dr. Mohsin Alam Bhat is a Lecturer in Law (Assistant Professor) at Queen Mary University of London, specializing in constitutional law and human rights. His expertise spans minority rights, religious regulation, and the law of democracy, examined through comparative, socio-legal, and cross-disciplinary lenses.
Mohsin’s current research investigates the challenges posed to democracy, minority rights, and the rule of law by authoritarianism in democratic or quasi-democratic settings. He also explores democratic resilience, particularly the role of electoral commissions in India and similar jurisdictions in safeguarding electoral integrity.
Mohsin’s academic research has been published in leading legal and cross-disciplinary journals, including the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Social and Legal Studies, Asian Journal of Comparative Law, the Journal of Law, Religion and State, and the Journal of Interpersonal Violence.
Before joining Queen Mary, Mohsin taught at Jindal Global Law School in India, where he was the Executive Director of the Centre for Public Interest Law and led legal clinics on hate crime and statelessness. He is also a visiting faculty member in the LLM in International & European Law program at Faculté de Droit, Université Catholique de Lille. Mohsin holds a law degree from NALSAR University of Law (India) and earned his LLM and JSD from Yale Law School.

Anna is a political scientist whose academic love affairs include research on political concepts, societal impacts of emerging technologies, and temporality. Her current and upcoming research analyses societal transformations from the perspectives of the EU digital policy, contemporary social contracts, and inclusivity. Alongside doing research, Anna is also working closely with her colleagues in developing and implementing the Demos Helsinki research agenda as well as our academic research operations.

Anna’s Demos Helsinki -based projects include, e.g., the European Commission funded projects KT4D (Knowledge Technologies for Democracy) and CommuniCity as well as the previously published Avoiding AI biases, an assessment framework for non-discriminatory AI systems.

Djamel Chikh is Associate Professor in Political Philosophy, Faculty of Social Sciences, Mouloud Mammeri University of Tizi Ouzou, Algeria. He holds a PhD from the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa and a doctorate degree in Political Science from the University of Paris Saclay. His research focuses on languages and politics, issues of citizenship and democracy, particularly in North Africa and Algeria.

Nathanaël Colin-Jaeger is a postdoctoral researcher in philosophy, with a strong interest in Economics and the History of ideas. His main research interests lie in Political Philosophy (in particular, markets and democracy, value pluralism) and Philosophy of Economics (Decision theory, social choice, competitive markets). He is also interested in the history of these domains, more particularly the history of liberalism and neo-liberalism.

In September 2022, he completed his Ph.D. dissertation in Political Philosophy at the ENS de Lyon in France: Governing with rules, political and legal neoliberal thinking, which focused on the contribution of Hayek, Lippmann, Buchanan, and Posner. This work was conducted partly at Duke University (Center for the History of Political Economy), where he stayed for one year. In this dissertation, he studied neoliberalism as a political theory mainly interested in the problem of the design of good rules to promote competitive markets.

During a postdoc in Fribourg after his Ph.D, he extended his the question of the recognition of complexity and value pluralism for contemporary societies. This led me him work on deliberative democracy as a way to cope with complexity and pluralism, and on polycentricity and federalism. He also partly work on topics related to behavioral economics.

After a BA in History and Philosophy of Science (Harvard College), Olivia Custer completed doctoral studies in philosophy (École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) with a dissertation showing how the problem of exemplarity articulates Kant's three Critiques. Her research since has involved a long, often indirect, grappling with Kant, revisiting the philosophical heritage of the Enlightenment to measure how that legacy can be taken up with the lessons of phenomenology, post-structuralism, and feminist scholarship. Around issues such as the death penalty, animal rights, hospitality, terrorism, or migration, she has explored how the conceptions of the ethical subject proposed by Continental philosophy provide specific ways of framing debates about the subject of rights, collective and individual responsibility, and the very language in which rights claims can be formulated.
As well as numerous articles, her publications include L’exemple de Kant, Peeters, 2012, co-edited volumes such as Sexualités, Genres et Mélancholie, Campagne Première, 2009; Foucault/Derrida Fifty Years Later, Columbia University Press, 2016, and translations including Michel Callon Markets in the Making, Zone Books, 2021; Peter Szendy Powers of Reading, Zone Books, forthcoming.
Olivia Custer has taught philosophy, literature, human rights and critical theory for over twenty years, notably at the Center for Critical Studies (Paris), Bard College (New York), University of Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), and the University of California (Berkeley). She currently teaches Comparative Literature and Philosophy at the American University of Paris.

Mirjam Dageförde is a researcher and author on failing representation, the relation of citizens and politics, party politics and inequality with a focus on Europe; France and Germany in particular.

She is currently Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics at the American University of Paris and an Associate Researcher at Sciences Po Paris and at the WZB (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, Center for Civil Society Research).

Previously, she worked as a Lecturer at Freie Universität Berlin (Department of Social and Political Science). She holds a PhD from Sciences Po Paris. While completing her PhD, she was awarded a Max Weber Fellowship at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence and was an OxPo Fellow at the University of Oxford, Nuffield College & Department of Politics and International Relations. She was also chercheuse invitée at the Paris School of Economics (invited by Jean-François Laslier and Thomas Piketty). 

Mirjam Dageförde has an interdisciplinary background, holding degrees in Political Science, Economics and Empirical Social and Political Analysis.

Leora Dahan Katz is an Assistant Professor at the Law Faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research focuses on criminal law, criminal theory, legal philosophy and moral philosophy, with special focus on the philosophy of punishment.

Before joining the faculty, Dr. Dahan Katz held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Polonsky Academy for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Van Leer Jersualem Institute (2016-2019), as well as a fellowship at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, (Legitimization of Modern Criminal Law Research Group-2016).

Dr. Dahan Katz received her LL.M. and J.S.D. from the Yale Law School. During her time at Yale, Dr. Dahan Katz was a Lilian Goldman Fellow and Graduate Director and Fellow at the Yale Centre for Law and Philosophy, where she ran the centre’s activities as well as the Law and Philosophy Speaker Series. Prior to arriving at Yale, she tutored Jurisprudence at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she studied law, philosophy and English literature, completing her degrees magna cum laude. She has published articles in leading peer review journals, including Law and Philosophy, the University of Toronto Law Journal and Ethics. Her work has earned her a variety prizes including the Wolf Foundation Scholarship Prize, the IVR Young Scholar Prize, the Pepita Haezrahi Academic Excellence Prize and the Felix S. Choen Prize for Best Legal Philosophy Paper, as well as a research grant from the Israel Science Foundation.

Mona El Khoury is Assistant Professor of French Studies at AUP. Before joining AUP in 2024, she was an Assistant Professor of French Studies at Tufts University. Her research deals with twentieth- and twenty-first-century French and Francophone cultures, literature, and theory (philosophy, psychoanalysis) with special emphasis on North Africa and the Middle East, as well as Metropolitan France. Her publications include her book Remnants of the Franco-Algerian Rupture: Archiving Postcolonial Minorities (published in 2020 by Lexington Books), a collective volume she co-edited on postcolonial ecocriticism (published in 2024 by Nouvelles Etudes Francophones), and several articles. She is a contributor of the online magazine K. Jews, Europe, the XXIst century.
In addition to her academic career, Professor El Khoury is trained in clinical psychology.

Emre Erdoğan, a faculty member at Istanbul Bilgi University, is a political scientist conducting researches on political participation, foreign policy, public opinion, child and youth well-being, methodology and statistics. His research interests include youth in Turkey, integration of Syrian refugees, othering, polarization and populism. He actively participates in research projects, serves as a reviewer, and he is the editor-in-chief of Istanbul Bilgi University Publishing House and editor of REFLEKTİF Journal of Social Sciences. He is involved in different COST Actions, H2020 and Erasmus projects.

Delphine Dogot is Associate professor of Law at the Faculty of Law of Université catholique de Lille since 2019, based at the Paris-Issy Campus. 

She is the Director of LeStudio, a collaborative and creative digital/law lab and the Academic Director of the Digital Tech Winter & Summer Schools and University Degree on Law and Digital Technologies. 

Delphine Dogot researches and teaches in the areas of law and technology, international law and legal philosophy, in particular in relation to global governance, risk and security. Her research investigates the tech-driven transformation of law and governance. She currently works on data-driven and blockchain governance architectures, on cybersecurity discourses and on the relations between algorithmic thinking and legal practices.

Born in England, Professor Feltham joined The American University of Paris in 2004. After a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) at the University of Sydney, he completed a PhD in philosophy at Deakin University, Melbourne, for which he carried out most of his research in Paris. His PhD focused on the ontological difference between work and action and spanned Ancient Greek philosophy and contemporary French philosophy.
His areas of expertise include critical theory, contemporary French philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis. His areas of competence include early modern philosophy, and political philosophy. His current project is to develop a history of models of political action, playing practical episodes of political innovation, such as in the English, American and French revolutions, against philosophers’ attempts to theorize those moments in their systematic accounts of politics and social justice. The first installment of this project was published in March 2013 by Bloomsbury under the title Anatomy of Failure: Philosophy and Political Action. It focuses on the Leveller-agitators in the English Revolution and the philosophies of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. The sequel to this book will focus on the American and French revolutions, and on the philosophies of action present in Adam Smith, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Edmund Burke. Feltham is also interested in contemporary poetics and aesthetics, particular with regard to theatre.

Zach Freig is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley in Political Theory. Before coming to Berkeley, Zach completed an MPhil at the University of Cambridge and a BA at the University of Winnipeg in the fields of intellectual history and philosophy. 

Zach’s research focuses on the intersections between political theory and the history of philosophy. His dissertation project will examine the philosophical foundations of twentieth-century French democratic theory; he is also developing projects on the reception of John Stuart Mill’s logical thought in the social sciences, and the modern historical origins of epistemology

Cristiano Gianolla integrates the thematic-line on “Democracy, Justice and Human Rights” at the Centre for Social Studies – University of Coimbra. He is the Principal Investigator of the UNPOP project (FCT) and PI and WP leader of the Horizon Europe projects PROTEMO and CO3. He co-founded and co-coordinates the "Inter-Thematic group on Migrations" and coordinates the courses "Democratic Theories and Institutions" (PhD) and "Critical Intercultural Dialogue" (MA). Cristiano researches on democratic theory, populism, emotion narrative, post-colonialism, intercultural dialogue, citizenship and migrations. Institutional profile: http://ces.uc.pt/en/ces/pessoas/investigadoras-es/cristiano-gianolla.

Professor Hägel, born in Germany, studied Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin, Columbia University and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Before joining The American University of Paris in 2006, he worked as researcher and consultant for the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, the German Bundestag, the European Commission, the House of Lords and other institutions. His research focuses on the intersections of comparative politics and international relations/political economy, and how transnational and global processes transform state sovereignty.

Cyril Hédoin is Professor of Economics at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne. He works at the intersection of economics and philosophy and has published in leading journals in institutional economics, philosophy of economics, analytic philosophy, and political philosophy. His most recent work addresses the possibility of agreement and justification in liberal societies. Within this broad topic, he has written on the possibility of a liberal epistocracy, the implications of the limits of our political knowledge for the justification of political and economic institutions, and the articulation between social choice theory and public reason liberalism.

Szilvia Horváth (PhD 2015) is a researcher and the interim project coordinator of the Continuous Construction of Resilient Social Contracts (CO3) Horizon Europe project (2024-27) at the University of Helsinki. She worked at various Hungarian universities between 2015-2023. Her work on agonism theory yielded a prize-winning book in Hungarian: Democracy and Political Community (2015), recognised by the Hungarian Political Science Association. Her latest book in Hungarian, Conflict and Politics: Towards a Theory of Agonism, was published by L’Harmattan Budapest in 2023.

Tamar Hostovsky Brandes is an Associate Professor at Ono Academic College’s Faculty of Law. She is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Israeli Thought and a researcher in the Center for Applied Research on Risks to Democracy at Tel-Aviv University. She earned her J.S.D and LL.M (cum laude) degrees from Columbia Law School, where she was a Finkelstein Fellow, and her LL.B from Tel Aviv University.
Hostovsky Brandes teaches and researches in the areas of international and constitutional law, focusing on the intersection between international law, constitutional law, and political theory. Her writing in these areas includes, for example, International Law in Domestic Courts in an Era of Populism, Democratic Erosion, Populist Constitutionalism, and the Unconstitutional Constitutional Amendment Doctrine (co-authored with Yaniv Roznai), Solidarity as a Constitutional Value and Basic Law: Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People: Implications for Equality, Self-Determination and Social Solidarity. Her article “The diminishing status of international law in the decisions of the Israeli Supreme Court concerning the Occupied Territories” received the 2021 International Journal of Constitutional Law Best Article award.
Hostovsky Brandes is the co-chair of the Israeli Chapter of the International Society of Pubic Law. She was an adjunct lecturer at the M.S. Program in Global Affairs at NYU and a short-term international visiting professor at Columbia Law School.

Myriam Hunter-Henin is a Professor of Comparative Law and Law & Religion at UCL Laws.

Her research addresses the interaction and tensions between Law and Religion in a comparative perspective. It also examines the interactions between human rights, constitutional law and normative conceptions of democracy, with a focus on education, employment and family law. After graduating in Law both in France and England, she completed her PhD doctorate at Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne University (Paris, France) on personal status, leading to a monograph (Pour une redefinition du statut personnel, PUAM, 2004, awarded the Dennery Prize), Myriam  has mainly taught on comparative law, family law, law & religion and human rights, first at Panthéon-Sorbonne University (Paris, France) where she was a research and teaching fellow and subsequently at the Faculty of Laws at University College London, where she was consecutively appointed as lecturer, Senior lecturer, Reader and since October 2021, Professor. She was also invited to Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli (LUISS) (Rome, Italy) to teach on the Summer 2020 Programme on Constitutional Law (moved to on-line setting), to UCLouvain as visiting Professor in May 2022 and to over 60 talks and keynote lectures in prestigious Universities and settings, such as the French Conseil d’Etat (2016).

Her latest monograph Why Religious Freedom Matters for Democracy, Hart, 2020 puts forward a democratic approach, which highlights the vital connections between religious freedom, pluralism and democracy and provides guidelines for judges confronted with difficult cases. Her most recent article published with Current Legal Problems 2024, “Religious Expression and Exemptions in the Private Sector Workplace: Spotting Bias”, (2024), pp. 1–25 , (https://doi.org/10.1093/clp/cuae008) contributes to the understanding of the judicial protection of human rights by putting forward a critique of “judicial bias” , defined as a systemic flaw in legal reasoning and legal justification when a principle is applied beyond its remit and rationale or competing interests are systematically and totally ignored. The article unravels and criticises three types of bias (the state, the economic and the religious bias) underlying current decisions on religious freedom in the private sector workplace. Her work on the French constitutional principle of secularism (French laïcité) yielded many articles, such as “Why the French Don’t Like the Burqa: Laïcité, National Identity and Religious Freedom”, published with International Comparative Law Quarterly (2012) which was selected as the basis for the International Comparative and Law Quarterly annual 2013 lecture.

Fabien Lechevalier is a PhD candidate in Law & Economics at Paris-Saclay University and a Fellow at Stanford University's Transatlantic Technology Law Forum. He is a researcher at the Centre for the Study and Research of “Immaterial” Law (CERDI) and an associate at the International Observatory on the Societal Impacts of AI and Digital Technology (OBVIA). His research focuses on the collective dimension of the right to informational privacy, data governance models, and legal design. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Cornell Tech's Digital Life Initiative, is a member of the NYU Privacy Research Group, and teaches law at several universities (Paris-Saclay University, Mines-Télécom, etc.).

Nefeli Lefkopoulou is currently working as an adjunct lecturer at Sciences Po Paris, teaching “The Judge and the Expert”, “Comparative Judicial Politics” and “the Politics of Electoral Systems”. Nine months ago, she obtained her Ph.D. in Public Law from Sciences Po Paris. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on evidence in constitutional adjudication from a comparative perspective. She also holds a Master’s degree in European Political and Administrative Studies from the College of Europe (Bruges), a Master 1 in Comparative Law from the University of Oxford and an LLB from the University of Paris II - Panthéon-Assas. In 2018, she was a visiting research fellow at the Càtedra de Cultura Jurídica at the University of Girona in Spain. During her doctoral research, she worked as an A.T.E.R. at the University of Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne and taught European Union Law, Administrative Law, Constitutional Law at various Law Faculties in Paris. She has also worked as a Multimedia Journalist (Toute L’Europe.eu), as a Research Assistant (Trinity College Dublin), and as a Law Clerk (Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP).

Simone Leotta est titulaire d’un doctorat en philosophie, réalisé au LIER-FYT (EHESS) en 2023 sous la direction de Bruno Karsenti. Dans ce cadre, il a développé une réflexion sur les sources philosophiques et religieuses de l’individualisme moderne avec le but d’interroger et de mieux comprendre le rapport entre la critique religieuse et le processus de nationalisation en Europe. Il est actuellement ATER à l’Université Jean Moulin - Lyon 3, où il enseigne la science politique. Auparavant, il a enseigné l’histoire des idées politiques et la philosophie des sciences sociales à l’Institut catholique de Paris, à l’EHESS et à l’Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Sains-Denis. Il a dirigé un dossier monographique sur la place des religions dans la modernité politique pour la revue Etica & Politica/Ethics & Politics. Il a publié des articles sur la pensée politique de Rousseau et de Schmitt ainsi que deux chapitres d’ouvrages sur les rapports entre la philosophie politique et les sciences sociales visant à élucider le statut de la réflexivité des sociétés modernes.

Professeur agrégé de philosophie et docteur en économie, Kevin Leportier est spécialisé dans les questions soulevées au croisement de ces deux disciplines. Sa thèse explore les fondements et implications de la prise en compte de la valeur de liberté dans le cadre de l’économie normative. Il est actuellement maître de conférences en économie à l'université de Caen.

After teaching political theory in America, (University of Rochester New York; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Harvard), Annabelle taught for several years in England, (University of Reading, London School of Economics) before joining the Political Science Department at the University of Geneva. She joined the Ecole Doctorale at Sciences Po in September, 2017, when she also became a member of CEVIPOF.

She is a co-editor of the Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy; and a member of the  editorial board of theEuropean Journal of Political Theory, and of Raison Politique. Her research on democratic theory, contemporary political theory, ethics and public policy, on security, privacy and intellectual property has been published in Philosophy and Public Affairs, The British Journal of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics,   the Journal of Applied Philosophy and CRISPP. (www.alever.net) She is the author of On Privacy and A Democratic Conception of Privacy, and the editor of New Frontiers in the Philosophy of Intellectual Property, and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Ethics and Public Policy and of Ideas That Matter. Since 2011, she has worked as an ‘ethics expert’ for the EU’s DG Research, and for national research agencies in Ireland, Estonia and Switzerland.

Clara Lucas est doctorante en science politique au Centre Émile Durkheim (Sciences Po Bordeaux). Sa thèse en cours, intitulée « L’action collective par ses sentiments moraux : étude de cas du mouvement des Gilets Jaunes à La Réunion et en Aquitaine » interroge, à travers les ressorts émotionnels de l’engagement, la participation politique populaire.

Ana Matan is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb where she teaches courses in political theory and democratic theory. Her academic interests range from normative political theory, especially the political theory of John Rawls to more critical democratic theories. Her research also includes democratic innovations, especially participatory budgeting. Since 2020, she is member of the Jean Monnet Network Debating Europe (2020-2024) that is using debate as a methodological tool to address EU’s identity and legitimacy issues. Since 2024, she is member of the CO3 Horizon project on continuous social contracts. Her publications include a book (in Croatian) on John Rawls’ theory of legitimacy (2008), chapters in edited volumes on democracy and politicization and articles in academic journals on nationalism, epistemic democracy and radical democratic theory. She has been an editor-in-chief (2014-2020) of a small academic journal Političke perspektive (Political Perspectives) published by the Faculties of Political Science of Zagreb and Belgrade. Currently, she is vice-president of the Croatian Political Science Association and co-director of a summer course Diversity of Human Rights at the Interuniversity Center in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

Okpanachi Elijah Ojochonu was born on the 23rd of September 1970 at Ofugo in Ankpa local Government of Kogi State Nigeria. He holds a PhD in Philosophy (Social and Political Philosophy) and is currently a professor of philosophy in the Department of Philosophy, Federal University of Lafia, Nasarawa State, Nigeria.
An academician having 24 years of experience in teaching and research at the University.
Published over 48 research papers in National journals, International journals, and National and International conferences. Member, Nigeria Philosophical Association, member, International Research and Development Network, Associate Member, Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. Lifetime member, Global Research and Development Services.

Senior University Lecturer in Political Science, University of Helsinki.

Emilia Palonen is Senior University Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Helsinki. She did her MA and PhD in Ideology and Discourse Analysis, at the University of Essex in the early 2000s, and has been working on politics, policy and populism across Europe. She leads the Helsinki Hub on Emotions, Populism and Polarisation (HEPP) and several externally funded projects, being a PI in the CO3 horizon project and for the first year of the project she is the Coordinator of the PLEDGE horizon project (2024-27). She also works as Research Director on datafication at the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (HSSH) at the University of Helsinki, and leads WP4 in CO3 and a cross-consortia sub-project on the European Parliamentary Elections campaign on social media (Instagram, TikTok and YouTube) in ten member states of the European Union.

Clémence Pellissier is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Trinity College Dublin. Her research focuses on the interactions between international tribunals (in particular the ICC/ICJ) in the context of the prevention and punishment of international and mass crimes.
More broadly, she works on the meanings and understandings of these crimes in post-war societies (at both an international level and national level). To do so, she uses political, legal, and philosophical approaches. This interdisciplinary approach is the result of her previous education (LLM in Comparative and International Law (TCD), Master 2 in Private Law (Paris 1) and Master 2 in Political Philosophy (Paris 1).

Théophile Pénigaud is an Associate Research Scholar at the Yale MacMillan Center, with a secondary affiliation with the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. His research focuses on democratic theory and egalitarianism. The book resulting from his thesis, “Les Délibérations du peuple: Contexte et Concepts de la philosophie politique de Jean-Jacques Rousseau” was published by Classiques Garnier. Among his most recent papers feature “Truth, the People, and Climate Change: Toward a Non-ideal Approach to Democratic Legitimacy” (Critical Review, 2024, 36(1-2), 20-44) and “Repousser les limites de la philosophie politique: David Estlund continuateur contradicteur de Rawls” (“Pushing the Limits of Political Philosophy: David Estlund Critical Inheritor of Rawls”) forthcoming in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (2024/4).

David Peters earned his master’s degree from the University of Edinburgh, his PhD from the University of Glasgow School of Interdisciplinary Studies, and currently lectures in the History and Politics Department here at AUP. His research focuses on the intellectual history of the US Constitution, particularly the contributions of James Wilson and his adherence to the philosophy of his fellow Scot Thomas Reid. And, how recovering that history, philosophy, and Wilson’s Reidian Democratic Political Theory can aid in understanding, informing, and addressing contemporary socio-epistemological, political, and legal issues.

Stephen W. Sawyer is the Ballantine-Leavitt Professor of History and Director of the Center for Critical Democracy Studies. Sawyer came to AUP from the University of Chicago center in Paris and the Ecole Normale Supérieure-rue d’Ulm where he was lecturer in the final years of his dissertation. After receiving fellowships from the EHESS, Fulbright, and Sciences Po, Sawyer served as part-time assistant to Pierre Rosanvallon at the Collège de France. A specialist in political history and theory, Sawyer earned his PhD at the University of Chicago. He has served on the editorial board of the Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales and as the Associate Editor for its English version since 2012. 

The core of his project articulates a history and theory of democracy as a mode of popular magistrature, administration and public regulation. The project advances along two dimensions: first, a critical intellectual history featuring a close rereading of key texts and authors that may be read surprisingly differently when one places democracy – rather than liberalism or republicanism – at the center of our histories of political modernity. Second, the project turns on a rediscovery and re-prioritization of the variety of substantive and concrete activities, programs, and policies that have constituted democratic action. The first volume of this project was published in 2018 under the title Demos Assembled: Democracy and the International Origins of the Modern State, 1840-1880 (University of Chicago Press). It was followed by a monograph entitled La contingence et le pouvoir (Armand Colin, 2018). This book, focusing on the highly contentious figure Adolphe Thiers, further elaborated the project’s methodology, “a pragmatic history of the political.” He is currently preparing the second volume on Regulation and the Birth of the Democratic Social Contract, 1810-1850. The project as a whole self-consciously builds on late twentieth-century, primarily French, democratic and social theory. 

Prof. Vandana Singh is Ph. D. in law, LL. M., LL.B., B.Sc., from the University of Delhi, Delhi, India. Dr. Singh is at present working as a Professor of Law at the USLLS, GGSIP University, Delhi, India. She has teaching experience of 18 years. Earlier she was working as a Research Officer at the Indian Institute of Public Administration (IIPA). Her areas of specialization are Intellectual Property Rights, Alternative Dispute Resolution, Constitutional Law, Private International Laws, and Consumer Laws. She has worked extensively for legal awareness, community outreach events, and legal aid in USLLS. She handled the legal department of GGSIP University from 2017 to 2020 and since 2020 she has been Associate Director of Students’ Welfare (DSW) and handling all student’s welfare related activities like Financial Assistance, Sports activities, Cultural activities, students’ election, annual festival etc., at GGSIP University. She is also the Project Director for the Centre for Extension and Outreach Activities at GGSIP University. She has authored a book titled Geographical Indications: Rising above Horizon. She has co-authored the book Case Laws on Medical Negligence: Consumer Case Laws, Series I, Department of Consumer Affairs, Government of India, in association with IIPA. She has co-authored three Monographs on Private International Law, Insurance Law, and Economic Law, for the International Encyclopedia of Laws, published by Wolters Kluwer, Law & Business. She has written many research papers, which have been published in various journals of national and international repute. She has also presented papers at many international and national conferences. 

Daniel Smilov is a political scientist and a specialist in comparative constitutional law. He is Associate Professor of Political Theory at the Department of Political Science at Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski ” and Programme Director of the Centre for Liberal Strategies.
He holds doctorates from the Central European University in Budapest (SJD, Summa cum laude, 1999) and the University of Oxford (DPhil, 2003). He has specialized at the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law and the European University Institute, Florence.
He is the author of a number of academic publications in English in the field of constitutional law, financing of political parties and anti-corruption policy. He has also published numerous articles in the Bulgarian press and periodicals.

Ruzha Smilova teaches contemporary political philosophy and history of political ideas at the Political Science Department of Sofia University. She is also a program director (political research) at the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria. Her academic research is in the fields of normative and positive theories of democracy, social contract theories, normative political theory. She has recently focused on studying democratic illiberalism and the relationship between meritocracy and liberal democracy. At the CLS she is involved in research and policy-related projects on quality of representative institutions in Central and Eastern Europe, on the causes for the rise of illiberal populism and the relation of media and democracy, among others.  

Her doctoral dissertation A Reason-based Justification for Liberal-Democratic Authority (2006) received Central European University dissertation award.

In 2021/2022 she was Democracy Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.

Her more recent publications include: "Centrist and Radical Populism in Central and Eastern Europe," co-authored with Daniel Smilov (2024), Democratic Crisis Revisited. The Dialectics of Politicisation and Depoliticisation, co-edited with Meike Schmidt-Gleim and Claudia Wiesner, (2022); "The Ideational Core of Democratic Illiberalism", in Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism (2021).

Andrew Stewart is a postdoctoral Research Associate at Chapman University’s Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy (Orange, California, USA). They earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy in May 2024 from the University of Southern California. The core of Andrew’s research concerns the aims and methodology of political philosophy. They are especially interested in questions that arise at the boundary with “the outside world”: where political philosophy comes into contact with real people, contemporary politics, and other disciplines. Andrew’s work has appeared in Political Theory, the European Journal of Political Theory, The Journal of Value Inquiry, and The Philosopher. Their dissertation, “Five Roles of the Political Philosopher,” presents a conception of political philosophers on which they are not merely theorists or truth-seekers, but also world-builders, storytellers, teachers, and citizens.

Zach Swirski is a PhD student at Mcmaster University in Canada. His interests are in the philosophy of difference, as defined by Gilles Deleuze. This concept of difference flows up from the experiential and the ontological, into the political and epistemological. His main research project is tracing this philosophy of difference from William James’s concept of radical empiricism to Deleuze’s concept of transcendental empiricism. Both thinkers advocate the primacy of difference, to the subordination of identity, A view that is counter to much of Western Philosophy. In a sense, his interest is in the methodological movement of thinking of parts before the wholes, or as wholes as being less than the sum of their parts. This bears clear implications in political philosophy, as questions of the State, Sovereignty, and Solidarity take on a new dimension in light of thinking against totalities. In the future, Zach hopes to address more normative questions of how it may look to disengage from the totalities which bind us to the limited subjectivity in which they impose.

Anja Thomas is Associate Professor (Maîtresse de conférences) at the University of Lille, currently on leave for a Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellowship at the Hochschule Fulda in cooperation with the Institut polytechnique de Paris and the Robert Schuman Centre of the European University Institute (EUI). In the past, Anja was OxPo postdoctoral fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford University, and Max Weber Fellow at the EUI.
Her research focusses on the transformation of representative democracy. She works on members of parliament as main anchors of representation and studies their interaction with government, business and civil society at different levels of governance. Anja combines ethnographic work on the microfondations of specific democratic belief systems with systematic comparison across groups and across time periods.

Aviezer Tucker is the Director of the Centre for the Philosophy of Historiography at the University of Ostrava. Dr. Tucker has been teaching for over thirty years. He held research positions and taught in the United States, Europe, and Australia, including at Harvard University, the University of Texas in Austin, the University of Cologne, the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Charles University in Prague, Queens University, the Australian National University, Long Island University, Johns Hopkins University, Trinity College, New York University, Columbia University, Palacky University and the Central European University. He has lectured internationally across the United States, Australia, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. He has published extensively about political philosophy and theory, the philosophy of the historical sciences, and the history of ideas.

Pınar Uyan-Semerci is a faculty member at Istanbul Bilgi University, Department of International Relations. Since 2007, she has been the director of the Center for Migration Center, and since 2017, she has been the dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities. Uyan-Semerci, whose academic fields of study are political philosophy, comparative politics, social policy, and methodology in social sciences, has conducted many research projects, published articles and books on justice, rights, citizenship, capability approach, poverty, migration, youth, collective identity formations, othering, polarization, and child well-being.

S’intéressant à la science juridique et, plus précisément, aux travaux de Hans Kelsen, Maude Vidal prépare actuellement une thèse de doctorat portant sur les conditions de possibilité d’un normativisme expérimental à l’EHESS sous la direction d’Olivier Cayla et Olivier Jouanjan. Associant pur positivisme et recherche empirique, elle aborde d’un point de vue philosophique les questions formelles d’épistémologie et celles, plus substantielles, de justice sociale.

Albert Weale has worked in the intersection of political theory and public policy. In political theory, his main contemporary intellectual influences have been John Rawls and H. L. A. Hart, and in the history of political thought John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick. In public policy, he has been particularly interested in understanding the intellectual paradigms that policy makers use, sometimes unconsciously, when making decisions, particularly in health policy and environmental policy.

His most recent book is Modern Social Contract Theory (Oxford University Press, 2020), which is a product of an ECRC Professorial Fellowship he held between 2009 and 2011. In the book, he explores the variety of forms that modern social contract theory has taken, examining their plausibility and coherence. The book forms a ‘prequel’ to Democratic Justice and the Social Contract (Oxford University Press, 2013). 

Over a number of years, he have worked on democracy and democratic theory, the key text of which is Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), a much revised and expanded version of a book originally published in 1999. In 2018, he published The Will of the People: A Modern Myth (Polity Press), which was intended as an intervention in public debate exposing the political misuse of a fictitious idea. He is currently planning some work on democracy over time.

Claudia Wiesner is Professor of Political Science at Fulda University of Applied Sciences, a member of the board of directors of the “Point Alpha Research Institute”, and adjunct Professor in Political Science at Jyväskylä University (Finland). She directs the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence “Europe in the World, is a PI in several other international research projects and networks, and has been a Visiting Fellow at Institutions such as the Minda de Gunzburg Centre for European Studies at Harvard University, New York University, the Robert Schumann Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute (EUI), and the Berlin Social Sciences Centre (WZB). Wiesner´s main research focuses on Europe in the World and the comparative study of democracy and governance in the EU, putting particular emphasis on the related concepts, ideas and theories. She has published with publishers such as Palgrave Macmillan, Routledge, Springer and Nomos and journal special issues and articles in journals such as Contemporary Political Theory, integration, Journal of European Integration, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, Leviathan, Politics and Governance, Political Research Exchange, Politische Vierteljahresschrift, Redescriptions, Parliaments, Estates and Representation, Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft and Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft. Her most recent books are "Politicisation, Democratisation and Identity formation in the EU" (Routledge 2024) and "The War Against Ukraine and the EU: Facing New Realities" (Palgrave Macmillan 2024, edited by Claudia Wiesner and Michèle Knodt).

See also https://wiesnerc.jimdofree.com/english/

Xhejn Xhindi obtained her BA at University of Bologna with a thesis on Deleuze&Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus; and her MA at University of Roma Tre with a thesis on Bruno Latour’s political philosophy and onto-epistemology. In September 2024 she started her PhD at Université libre de Bruxelles under the supervision of Professor Didier Debaise, with a thesis project centered on Bruno Latour’s tangling of onto-epistemological and political theory, also in a dialogue with feminist philosophy of science and a situated field research. 

She collaborates with Roma Tre political philosophy Professor Federica Giardini, her MA thesis supervisor, where they together hold a laboratory on thinking environmental humanities. She will also hold lectures on Bruno Latour at the political philosophy 2024-2025 MA course at Roma Tre. 

She has published several articles on international magazines centered on political ecology, as well as translations and book reviews. 

She writes articles on political ecology, feminist philosophy of science and STS. Her current research interests include Bruno Latour’s legacy in political ecology, Isabelle Stengers philosophy and history of science, feminist philosophy of science.

Dr. Zona Zarić is a philosopher and feminist, Professor of Political Philosophy and Contemporary Political Thought at The American University of Paris, and Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory, Belgrade University. In her work, she focuses on problems of political and moral philosophy. 

She holds a PhD from the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Ulm, Paris), in which she proposed a stabilized conceptualization of the notion of compassion and its political use - as a way to support the autonomous becoming of a vulnerable other and to face certain challenges induced by the triumph of individualism. What is the need to make compassion a political concept? How can we broaden the scope of our collective political attention? By virtue of what can we reinterpret the ethico-political heritage in the light of a new questioning of the meaning of the relationship to the other? To achieve a philosophy of compassion, which is both a politics of compassion and a praxis. By bringing to life a neo-modernity of compassion, by putting Western moral philosophies in dialogue, starting with Simone Weil, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and ending with Hannah Arendt and Martha Nussbaum, in order to find a transcendence, a kind of atheistic spirituality that emerges in the present of the relationship to the Other.

Roman Zinigrad is Assistant Professor of Law at the American University of Paris. He is the coordinator of the History, Law & Society undergraduate program, and Fellow at the AUP Center for Critical Democracy Studies (CCDS). Roman is also a co-PI of the CO3 project (Continuous Construction of Resilient Social Contracts Through Societal Transformations) of the Horizon Europe program.

He specializes in constitutional law and theory, comparative constitutional law, and law and education. Roman’s research interests include law and religion, international human rights law, and children’s rights. He has published on the right to education, parental rights, free speech (and humor), freedom of religion, and legal aspects of the French approach to radical violence.

Roman received his J.S.D. degree from Yale Law School. He holds an LL.B. and M.A. (Phil.) from Bar-Ilan University in Israel, as well as an LL.M. from Yale Law School. Before his graduate studies, he clerked with Honorable Justice Salim Joubran at the Israel Supreme Court.

He served as a drafting committee member of the “Abidjan Principles” (Guiding Principles on the Human Rights Obligations of States to Provide Public Education and to Regulate Private Involvement in Education).