Daniel Treisman

Daniel Treisman is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles and Interim Director of UCLA’s Center for European and Russian Studies. A graduate of Oxford and Harvard, he has published six books and many articles in leading political science and economics journals, as well as numerous commentaries in public affairs journals and the press. His research focuses on Russian politics and economics as well as comparative political economy, including the analysis of democratization, the politics of authoritarian states, political decentralization, and corruption. 

A former editor of The American Political Science Review, he is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and has consulted for the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and USAID. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford), the Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna), and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford), and he is currently an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. In 2023, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His latest book, co-authored with Sergei Guriev, Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century (Princeton University Press, 2022), has been translated into 13 languages and won the Prix Guido et Maruccia Zerilli-Marimo of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in Paris. 

Gergely Márton

Gergely Márton a HVG felelős szerkesztője, 2017-ben igazolt a kiadóhoz, hogy a hvg.hu stábját erősítse. Történelmet és médiatudományokat tanult az ELTE-n és Hamburgban. Rendszeres szerzője volt a Magyar Narancsnak és a berlini „die tageszeitung” napilapnak. A Népszabadság bezárásakor a lap főszerkesztő-helyettese. Kétszeres Minőségi Újságírás-díjas szerző, 2022. óta a bécsi székhelyű Nemzetközi Sajtóintézet felügyelőbizottsági tagja.

Mehrdad Vahabi

Mehrdad Vahabi is Professor of Economics at University Sorbonne Paris Nord and director of the research center on Economics at North Paris (CEPN) affiliated to the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). He has published many books in English, French and Persian among them The Political Economy of Destructive Power (Edward Elgar, 2004), The Political Economy of Predation (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Destructive Coordination, Anfal, and Islamic Political Capitalism: A New Reading of Contemporary Iran (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). He has published more than a hundred articles in peer journals and is an editor of Public Choice. 

Rosta Miklós

associate professor (docens)

Miklós Rosta received his PhD in economics in 2012. He was the head of the Department of Comparative and Institutional Economics till 2022. He is the Director of the Center of Central Asia Research at Corvinus University of Budapest, where he is associate professor. He serves as editor in the Hungarian Economic Review (Közgazdasági Szemle). His publications appeared in Public Choice, Administration & Society, International Studies of Management and Organization and Society & Economy. He published a monograph titled Innovation, Adaptation or Imitation: The New Public Management and edited many volumes. In 2019, he received Bolyai research grant from the Hungarian Academy of Science. He served as member of board of the Scientific committee for Economics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences between 2021-2023. He was visiting professor at Sorbonne Nord Paris in 2023.

Timur Kuran

Timur Kuran is Professor of Economics and Political Science, and Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University. His research focuses on (1) economic, political, and social change, with emphases on institutions and preferences, and (2) the economic and political history of the Middle East, with a focus on the roles of Islamic institutions.

His publications include Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (1995), The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (2011), and Freedoms Delayed: The Political Legacy of Islamic Law in the Middle East (2023).

He was educated at Princeton University and Stanford University. He directs the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS); co-edits a book series for Cambridge University Press, “Economics, Choice and Society”; and co-edits the Journal of Comparative Economics. As a promoter of expressive freedoms, Kuran is a founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA), and he serves on the advisory council of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)

Vladimir Gel’man

Vladimir Gel’man is Professor of Russian Politics at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki. For many years, he has taught at the European University at St. Petersburg, Russia. He authored many books and journal articles on politics and governance in Russia, including Authoritarian Russia: Analyzing Post-Soviet Regime Changes (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) and The Politics of Bad Governance in Contemporary Russia (University of Michigan Press, 2022).