Pablo Beramendi is a Professor of Political Science (Political Economy) at Duke University. He completed his doctorate (D.Phil.) at the University of Oxford in 2003 and was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Science Center, Berlin. Prior to Duke, he has been a faculty member at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University (2004-2007) and the University of Oxford (2009-2011), where he was also a fellow of University College.  His work focuses on the political economy of inequality and redistribution. In particular, he has worked on three areas: the link between economic and political geography and the politics of fiscal integration in federations, the origins and consequences of states’ fiscal capacity, and the connection between economic and political inequality. He is the author of multiple publications in each of these three lines of inquiry, including The Political Geography of Inequality (2012, Cambridge University Press) and Economic and Political Inequality: Competition, Spending, and Turnout, co-authored with Francesc Amat, and soon to be published as well by Cambridge University Press.

Joan Clos is the former Executive Director of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), at the level of Under-Secretary-General by the United Nations General Assembly. He held this office from October 2010-December 2017. Currently is Distinguised Fellow at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI). He was twice elected Mayor of Barcelona, serving two terms from 1997 until 2006. He was Minister of Industry, Tourism, and Trade of Spain between 2006 and 2008. Prior to joining the United Nations, he served as the Spanish Ambassador to Turkey and Azerbaijan. He is a medicine graduate from the Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), and specialized in Public Health and Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland). At the international level, in 1998 Dr. Clos was elected President of Metropolis, the international network of cities. Two years later, he was elected President of the World Association of Cities and Local Authorities (WACLAC). Between 2000 and 2007, he served as the Chairman of the United Nations Advisory Committee of Local Authorities (UNACLA). And between 1997 and 2003, he was member of the Council of European Municipalities and Regions (CEMR).

Michele de Nevers is Executive Director of Sustainability Programs at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to Berkeley, de Nevers was a senior associate at the Center for Global Development (CGD) in Washington, DC, where she headed its climate change program and led a team working to establish the Tropical Forest Finance Facility, a multilateral wealth fund and pay-for-performance mechanism to finance reduced deforestation of tropical forests.  She continues to work with CGD as a non-resident fellow on climate issues. Before joining CGD, de Nevers was a visiting fellow at the Global Economic Governance Programme at University College, Oxford, researching private investment for climate finance and economic development. From 1981 to 2010 she worked for the World Bank, including as senior manager of the Environment Department and director at the World Bank Institute. She managed environment programs in the Latin America and Eastern Europe/Central Asia regions.  During 2019 and 2020 she was visiting professor at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI).

Arthur Holland Michel is a writer and researcher. He currently serves as an associate researcher for the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, where his work focuses on the military applications of artificial intelligence and autonomy, and as a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.  He has written about drones, surveillance, artificial intelligence, robots, and the arts for Wired, Vice, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic.com, The Verge, Fast Company, Motherboard, Al Jazeera America, Bookforum, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Mashable Spotlight, and an Oxford Research Encyclopedia, among other outlets. His first book, Eyes in the Sky, about the rise of advanced aerial surveillance technology, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in June 2019. Arthur is a founder of the Center for the Study of the Drone, a research institute at Bard College in New York State where he served as co-director from 2012 to 2020. During 2019 and 2020 he was visiting research fellow at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI).

Anastassia V. Obydenkova is Senior Research Fellow at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI). She is a leading research fellow at National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow), and a research affiliate at the Institute for Economic Analysis of the Spanish Council for Scientific Research (Barcelona). She holds a PhD in Political and Social Science from the European University Institute (Florence, 2006). She was awarded Fox Fellowship at Yale University, Fung Global Fellowship at Princeton University, and she was  Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Senior Research Scholar at Harvard University. She studies modern autocracies, international organizations, regionalism, democratization, post-Communism, with area-focus on former Soviet states and China. Her work on these topics had been published in such journals as World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Post-Soviet Affairs, Review of International Organizations, Intelligence among others. She published Authoritarian Regionalism in the World of International Organizations: Global Perspective and the Eurasian Enigma (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Umut Özkirimli is Senior Research Fellow at IBEI and visiting professor at Blanquerna – Universitat Ramon Llull. He is also a Senior Research Associate at CIDOB (Barcelona Centre for International Affairs).

Before relocating to Barcelona, he was a Professor at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES), Lund University. He is the author of Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000; second revised and extended edition 2010. Translated into Turkish, Greek, Arabic, Persian, Albanian); Contemporary Debates on Nationalism: A Critical Engagement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Translated into Turkish and Chinese); Tormented by History: Nationalism in Greece and Turkey (with Spyros A. Sofos, Hurst & Co. and Oxford University Press, 2008. Translated into Turkish and Greek). His latest books are The Making of a Protest Movement in Turkey: #occupygezi (edited collection, Palgrave Pivot, 2014) and Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction (third revised and extended edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 

Martin Shaw is a historical sociologist of global politics, war and genocide. His books include Marxism and Social Science (1974), Dialectics of War (1988), Post-Military Society (1991), Civil Society and Media in Global Crises (1996), Theory of the Global State (2000), War and Genocide (2003), The New Western Way of War (2005), What is Genocide? (2007) and most recently Genocide and International Relations: Changing Patterns in the Transitions of the Late Modern World (2013). He is Research Professor at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI), Professorial Fellow in International Relations and Human Rights at the University of Roehampton, London, and Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex.

Prerna Singh is Mahatma Gandhi Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Brown University. She holds appointments across Political Science and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, and is also affiliated with the Departments of Sociology and the Center for Contemporary South Asia. Singh is a fellow of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research (CIFAR) and co-convenor of the Brown-Harvard-MIT Joint Seminar in South Asian Politics. Singh completed her PhD and MA from the Department of Politics at Princeton University, the tripos in Social and Political Studies from Cambridge University, UK, and a BA (Honors) in Economics from St Stephen’s College at Delhi University. Prior to joining Brown she was at the Department of Government at Harvard University. Singh’s research focuses on the improvement of human well-being, particularly as it relates to the promotion of social welfare on the one hand, and to the mitigation of ethnic conflict and competition, on the other. Her work combines multiple methods including comparative historical, ethnographic, statistical, survey and experimental analyses. Singh’s research has won numerous prizes across the disciplines of Political Science and Sociology. Her book, How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social Development in India (Cambridge University Press 2016), was awarded both the American Political Science Association’s  Woodrow Wilson prize for the best book published in politics and international relations.

Eduard Soler i Lecha is a Senior Research Fellow at CIDOB (Barcelona Centre for International Affairs). Between 2016 and 2019, he was scientific coordinator of MENARA, a European project on geopolitical shifts in the Middle East and North Africa. He holds a PhD in International Relations from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Dr. Soler i Lecha is a political scientist and a part-time lecturer in International Relations at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals and at Ramon Llull-Blanquerna University. From 2013 to 2017 he lead the El Hiwar project on Euro-Arab diplomacy at the College of Europe (Bruges) and in 2010 he was seconded to the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs as an advisor in the Direction General for the Mediterranean, the Maghreb and the Middle East. He has also advised in several occasions the Catalan government and the Barcelona local governments on Euro-Mediterranean affairs. His main areas of expertise are: Euro-Mediterranean relations, Turkey’s foreign and domestic politics, North African and Middle Eastern political dynamics, Spain's Mediterranean policy and security cooperation in the Mediterranean. He is a member of the Observatory of European Foreign Policy, FIMAM (the Spanish network of researchers working on Arab and Muslim studies), EuroMeSCo and the advisory boards of Mediterranean Politics and IEMed’s Mediterranean Yearbook.

Lurdes Vidal is Head of the Arab and Mediterranean World Department at the IEMed. She holds a degree in Translation and Interpretation from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and studied International Relations. She is Editor-in-Chief of the quarterly journal afkar/ideas and contributes to diverse media. She lectures on the subject of Arab Politics in the Master on the Arab and Islamic World at the University of Barcelona. Her notable publications include “Democracia islámica: ¿un debate envenenado?”, in Ámbitos de Política y Sociedad (2008), Los retos de la educación básica en países del Mediterráneo Sur, Fundación Carolina/CeALCI/IEMed (2006); “Islam político y democracia, riesgo u oportunidad?”, in Ámbitos de Política y Sociedad (2006), “El reto del desarrollo en Egipto”, in DCidob (2006), “Syria, Vertigo in the Face of a Radicalised Revolution and an Uncertain Future”, a Med.2012 IEMed Mediterranean Yearbook (2012), “Perceptions on Democracy and Islamism: Hypotheses and Second-Guessed Predictions”, a Euromed Survey 2011 (2012) y “Blogs y redes sociales: la rebelión de los jóvenes árabes” (2013), Fundación Tres Culturas del Mediterráneo (en prensa). She lived in Damascus (Syria) in 1998, where she studied Arabic.