Knowledge Hub on Democracy

Dan Banik is professor of political science, director of the Oslo SDG Initiative at the Centre for Development and the Environment, and affiliate professor at Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo. He is also Academic Director of the Democracy Hub at Circle U. European University Alliance and Extraordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria. His books include Political Transition, Poverty, and Inclusive Development in Malawi: The Democratic Dividend; Poverty and Elusive Development; and Starvation and India’s Democracy. Prof. Banik was a Visiting Professor and Consulting Scholar at Stanford University (2010-2017) and a Visiting Professor at China Agricultural University (2012-2017). He is the host of the In Pursuit of Development podcast with listeners in 160 countries.

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Professor of political science
Centre for Development and the Environment
University of Oslo

Sophie Coeuré is Full Professor of contemporary history at Université  Paris Cité. Her research and teaching interests include Russian-Soviet and European modern History, Communism in a globalized world, displaced cultural proper-ties, and the comparative political and cultural history of archives. Her current research project focuses on dissident movements and the defense of human rights in USSR and the “Eastern bloc” in the 1950-1990s, transnational mobili-zations and information flows. She develops teaching and joint reflection with students on public history, the political uses of history. Full bibliography, keyword Coeuré.

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Professor of contemporary history
Faculté Sociétés et Humanités
Université Paris Cité

Barbara De Cock holds an MA both in Linguistics and Literature, and in European Studies, and a PhD in Spanish linguistics (KULeuven), and is currently professor of Spanish linguistics at UCLouvain. Her research concerns a wide variety of political and societal discourses, which directly or indirectly play a role in democratic decision-making and which point at the challenges for ensuring an adequate representation of the diversity present in society. This includes work on the discourse by politicians on Twitter, (online) activism concerning sustainability and patient rights, hatespeech, discourses on human rights abuses, discourse on populism and on the pandemic.

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Institute for Language and Communication/Linguistics Research Unit
Faculty of Philosophy, Arts and Letters
UCLouvain

Nemanja Džuverović is professor in Peace Studies at the University of Belgrade. He is also adjunct professor at the Northwestern University His research areas include critical peacebuilding, international statebuilding in the Balkans, and sociology of International Relations. He has been visiting researcher at the University of Manchester, the University of Uppsala, the University of Bradford and the University of Granada. At the moment he is serving as the Vice-Dean for Research and International Cooperation at the Faculty of Political Science. He is co-editor of the Journal of Regional Security and program co-director of the MA Peace, Security and Development.

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Faculty of Political Science
University of Belgrade

Lars Johannsen studies the nexus of democratization, governance, and corruption. He pioneered student-driven research on election observation.  Publications include “Tell-tale tit: retaliation on whistleblowers in public administration; “Recent Developments in Democracy in Slovenia (Problems of Post-Communism); “Where and How You Sit: How Civil Servants View Citizens’ Participation” (Administration & Society).

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Aarhus School of Business and Social Sciences
Aarhus University

Claudia-Y. Matthes is a Senior Lecturer at HU Berlin’s Department of Social Sciences and Director of its international MA Programmes. She has been a Circle U Chair for Democracy already since 2021 and is currently also leading the Jean Monnet Chair "ShapingEU". Her specialisation includes European integration, comparative democracy studies, institutional and actor-centred approaches to political science and German domestic politics. Since 2016, she has been acting as the department’s Erasmus Coordinator and teaches regularly at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara/Turkey and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

I specialise in practice-oriented studies of government, with a long-standing fascination of the role of documents in society and democracy. Working across textual, historical and practice-oriented disciplines, my research projects have spanned foreign aid, ocean policy, evaluation, performance audit, textual citizenship and generative AI.

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Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies
University of Oslo

Valentina Calderai is Associate Professor of Private Law, Comparative Private Law, and AI Law applied to Biomedicine at the University of Pisa, where she is coordinator of the Private Law curriculum of the Doctoral Programme in Law. She holds master’s degree in Philosophy (University of Urbino), Law (University of Florence) and a PhD in Private Law and Comparative Private Law (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna). 

She is currently the holder and coordinator of the Jean Monnet Chair 'Health Law and Development in the European Union' (HeLDEn, 2023–2026), funded by the European Commission, and serves as Principal Investigator for the project 'A Legal Framework and Feasibility Study for Open Access Biobanks' (ALeF, 2023–2025), funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research.

Her research interests span European private law and consumer protection, the regulation of biotechnologies, and the market for reproductive services.

Her recent publications include The Regulation of Health Technologies. A European Perspective (with C. De Maria), Pisa University Press, 2025; The Self and the Commodified Self: Biotechnologies before the Bare Life, in H.W. Micklitz & G. Vettori (eds.), The Future of the Person, Hart Publishing, 2025.

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Associate Professor of Private Law, Comparative Private Law, and AI Law applied to Biomedicine

Department of Law, University of Pisa

Valentin Domann is a geographer and postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His research focuses on the spatial dimensions of authoritarian formations and socio-spatial transformation processes, with particular attention to conflicts over space, political ecology, and planning for just socio-ecological transitions. A key feature of his work is collaborative knowledge production across research and teaching, including transdisciplinary cooperation with practitioners and collective forms of writing and publishing.

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Geography Department
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

I am a Lecturer in Comparative Politics in the Department of Political Economy (DPE) on the education pathway, where I contribute to the DPE educational leadership team. I am also a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and serve as an external examiner at the University of Bristol.

Currently, I am particularly interested in how party actors at the fringes of the ideological spectrum use the European Parliament arena to pursue goals in the domestic political context. This is reflected in my recent publications on Brothers of Italy and the European Conservatives and Reformists group in the European Parliament.

My current research relates to cognitive linguistics, semantics, pragmatics and discourse analysis. These studies examine verbal prefixes, metaphors, metonymies and symbols in political discourse, multimodal presentation of migration in South Slavic media, and impoliteness in online communication and interpreting.