Mark R. Beissinger is the Henry W. Putnam Professor of Politics at Princeton and Director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS). In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, Beissinger is author or editor of five books, including most recently Historical Legacies of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2014). His book Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge University Press, 2002) received multiple awards, including the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award presented by the American Political Science Association for the best book published in the United States in the field of government, politics, or international affairs. Recent writings have dealt with such topics as individual participation in the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004 and in the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions in 2011, the impact of new social media on opposition movements in autocratic regimes, Russian imperialism in Eurasia, how to think about an historical legacy, the relationship between nationalism and democracy, and the evolving character of revolutions over the last century. Beissinger received his B.A. from Duke University in 1976 and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1982.
Melani Cammett is Professor of Government at Harvard University. Cammett's recent books include Compassionate Communalism: Welfare and Sectarianism in Lebanon (Cornell University Press 2014), which won the American Political Science Association (APSA) Giovanni Sartori Book Award and the Honorable Mention for the APSA Gregory Luebbert Book Award; A Political Economy of the Middle East (co-authored with Ishac Diwan, Westview Press 2015); and The Politics of Non-State Social Welfare in the Global South (co-edited with Lauran Morris MacLean, Cornell University Press 2014). Her current research projects explore governance and the politics of social service provision by public, private and non-state actors in the Middle East and identity politics in the region. Cammett is also beginning a new project on the long-term historical roots of distinct development trajectories in the Middle East. She has published numerous articles in academic and policy journals, consults for development policy organizations, and is the recipient of various fellowships and awards.
Paul Y. Chang is Assistant Professor of Sociology and serves on the Executive Committee of the Korea Institute at Harvard University. He is the author of Protest Dialectics: State Repression and South Korea’s Democracy Movement, 1970-1979 (Stanford University Press 2015) and co-editor of South Korean Social Movements: From Democracy to Civil Society (Routledge 2011). Chang’s research on social and political change in South Korea has also appeared in several disciplinary and area studies journals including Social Forces, Mobilization, and the Journal of Korean Studies.
David Cunningham is Professor of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. His current research focuses on the causes, sequencing, and legacy of racial and ethnic contention, and has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. His latest book, Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era's Largest KKK, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013 and served as the basis for a PBS American Experience documentary of the same name earlier this year.
Danijela Dolenec is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Zagreb and President of the Board of the newly-founded Institute for Political Ecology. She teaches comparative politics, social science methods and politics of protest, while in her research particularly particularly focuses on postsocialist political economy, and the role of contentious politics in democratization. In addition to that, she has recently become interested in the history of social sciences in Yugoslavia and their particular genealogy to this day. Some of her recent works include Democratic Institutions and Authoritarian Rule in Southeast Europe (ECPR Press 2013), ), 'Why power is not a peripheral concern: Exploring the relationship between inequality and sustainability' (2014, with Domazet and Ančić), and 'Exploring commons theory for principles of a socialist governmentality' (RRPE 2016, with Žitko).
Sam Handlin is assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Utah and was previously a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. In addition to several articles in academic journals, he is the co-editor and co-author of Reorganizing Popular Politics: Participation and the New Interest Regime in Latin America (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009) and is close to finishing another book manuscript, tentatively titled The Politics of Polarization: State Crises, Party Systems, and Democratic Erosion in Post-Cold War South America. His next major projects examines the roles of autocratic regional powers such as China, Russia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia in shaping regime trends in other countries.
Julie Hemment received her Ph.D. from Cornell University and is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research to date examines issues of gender, youth, NGOs and civil society in postsocialist Russia. Her first book, Empowering Women in Russia: Aid, NGOs and Activism (Indiana University Press, 2007), examined nineties-era democratization projects from the vantage point of provincial Russian women’s groups. Her most recent research – supported by the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, IREX, and the National Science Foundation – has tracked the aftermath of international development aid in post-Soviet Russia by interrogating Putin-era civil society projects. Her second book, Youth Politics in Putin’s Russia: Producing Patriots and Entrepreneurs (Indiana University Press, 2015) ethnographically examines the controversial nationalist youth projects that proliferated between 2005-2011, exploring both the forces that prompted them and the motivation of their participants.
Wolfgang Merkel is the Director of the Department “Democracy and Democratization”, WZB – Berlin Social Science Center. He is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. Merkel is also a Professor of Political Science at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
He has published a variety of books and papers, including Are Capitalism and Democracy Compatible? (2014), Is There a Crisis of Democracy? (2014), The Future of Representative Democracy(2011), Are Dictatorships Returning? Revisiting the ‘Democratic Rollback’ Hypothesis (2010), and War and Democratization. Legality, Legitimacy and Effectiveness (2009).
His major research interests are political regimes (democracy-dictatorships), democratization, political parties, social democracy, and social justice.
Dr. David A. Palmeris an Associate Professor and head of the department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong, which he joined in 2008. A native of Toronto, he graduated from McGill University in Anthropology and East Asian Studies. After completing his PhD in the Anthropology of Religion at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, he was the Eileen Barker Fellow in Religion and Contemporary Society at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and, from 2004 to 2008, director of the Hong Kong Centre of the French School of Asian Studies (Ecole Française d'Extrême-Orient), located at the Institute for Chinese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the author of the award-winning Qigong Fever: Body, Science and Utopia in China (Columbia University Press, 2007), co-author with Vincent Goossaert of The Religious Question in Modern China (University of Chicago Press, 2011; awarded the Levenson Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies). He is currently finishing a book manuscript, co-authored with Rundong Ning, tentatively titled Intimate Utopias: Volunteering, Individualization and Civil Society in China.
Scott Radnitz is an Associate Professor in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and Director of the Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies at the University of Washington. He does research on post-Soviet politics, covering topics such as protests, authoritarianism, informal networks, and identity. His book, Weapons of the Wealthy: Predatory Regimes and Elite-Led Protests in Central Asia, was published by Cornell University Press in 2010. His articles have appeared in journals including Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, British Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Democracy. He is currently doing research on the political uses of conspiracy theories in post-Soviet states.
