Kristóf Szombati is a scholar, educator and practitioner based in Berlin. After spending a decade in the Hungarian environmental movement, he co-founded the green LMP party and was an elected member of the Steering Committee which initially led the party. He left LMP in 2011 to pursue a doctoral degree focusing on the rise of racist and authoritarian politics in rural Hungary. Since defending his PhD at the Central European University (CEU) in 2016, Kristóf has been active as both a scholar and democracy practitioner. He has published extensively on right-wing politics, taught courses on de-democratization at universities in the US and Europe, and supported a series of re-democratization initiatives in his native Hungary and more recently in Germany where he has been living since 2022. His current employer is the Humboldt University, and he is acting Editor for Political Economy at the Review of Democracy.

Erdem Evren is an anthropologist and translator living in Berlin. Erdem is originally from Turkey, where he studied ethnographically the AKP's rule in the rural Northeastern part of the country. His book, Bulldozer Capitalism, shows that people can accommodate their own dispossession and displacement if they are directed to negotiate, invest in, and speculate on the destruction of their built environment and nature.