Daunis Auers is Professor of European Studies and Jean Monnet Chair at the University of Latvia, Director of the LaSER (Latvia’s Strategy and Economic Research) think tank and a member of the Latvian president’s National Competitiveness Council. His research interests are in the comparative politics, economics and regional integration of the Baltic and Nordic states. The privately funded LaSER think tank, founded in 2024, is focused on building Latvia’s regional competitiveness. Professor Auers defended his PhD at University College London and previously studied at the London School of Economics. He has been a Fulbright Scholar at the University of California-Berkeley (2005-2006), University of Washington in Seattle (2023-2024) and a Baltic-American Freedom Foundation Scholar at Wayne State University in Detroit (2014).
Dina Sharipova is Associate professor and Vice-Dean for research at the Graduate School of Public Policy at Nazarbayev University in Astana. Her research interests include nation- and state-building, security issues, formal and informal institutions, civil society, and well-being in Central Asia. Dr. Sharipova was a Board member of the European Society for Central Asian Studies and is currently an incoming president of the Central Eurasian Studies Society.
She is a member of Editorial Board for Central Asian Survey and Public Administration Development Journal. Dr. Sharipova is the author of the book “State-building in Kazakhstan: Continuity and Transformation of Informal Institutions”, Lexington Books, 2018 and co-authored the volume “Post-colonial Approaches in Kazakhstan and Beyond”, Palgrave McMillan, 2024. She has published her work in Europe-Asia Studies, Nationalities Papers, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Journal of Happiness Studies, and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism.
Andrea Pető is a Professor at the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University, Vienna, Austria, a Research Affiliate of the CEU Democracy Institute, Budapest, and a Doctor of Science at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Pető is an internationally sought-after public speaker on gender, politics, the Holocaust, and war, and her works have been translated into 25 languages. She has held visiting professorships at universities in Argentina, Canada, Germany, Israel, Serbia, and Sweden.
She received numerous awards for her contributions to public life, including the 2018 All European Academies (ALLEA) Madame de Staël Prize for Cultural Values and the 2022 University of Oslo Human Rights Award. She is a Doctor Honoris Causa of Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. Recent publications include The Women of the Arrow Cross Party: Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators in the Second World War, Palgrave, Macmillan, 2020, and Forgotten Massacre: Budapest 1944, DeGruyter, 2021.
Dr Olesya Khromeychuk is a historian and writer. She is the author of The Death of a Soldier Told by His Sister (2022). Khromeychuk has written for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Prospect and The New Statesman, and has delivered a TED talk on ‘What the World Can Learn From Ukraine's Fight for Democracy’. She has taught the history of East-Central Europe at several British universities and is currently the Director of the Ukrainian Institute London. www.olesyakhromeychuk.com
Dmitry Dubrovsky (PhD) is a Russian historian and sociologist, a lecturer in the Boris Nemtsov Russian Studies program at Charles University (Prague), and a professor at the Free University (Riga).
Since the early 2000s, Dubrovsky has served as an expert witness in cases involving charges of incitement to hatred or “extremism, (art-group “Voina,” the religious organization Hizb ut-Tahrir, the National Bolshevik Party, and Russian neo-Nazis). In 2015, he founded the Amicus Curiae project, which brings together an independent network of experts and conducts research on court-ordered special forensic examinations. He was a co-author of the first publication in Russia dedicated to hate speech on the Russian Internet (2003). He has published several articles on the distinctive Russian practice of “special judicial expertise,” particularly in cases involving religious minorities and allegations of ethnic or racial hatred, as well as hate crime against LGBTQ. Currently, he is completing a monograph summarizing the history and practice of special forensic examinations in Russia.
Since 2020, he has also been involved in a research project on academic rights and freedoms in Russia at CISRUS, which includes maintaining the Gaudeamus blog on this topic. He has published numerous articles and reports on the state of academic freedom in Russian higher education. After the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Dubrovsky left Russia. In April 2022, he was designated a so-called “foreign agent” by the Russian authorities.