In 2000, Rosemary Bechler, co-founded and chaired Peaceworkers UK, later absorbed into International Alert, while helping to pilot an innovative online global discussion forum, openDemocracy, in which she became European, then International Editor. In 2006 Counterpoint, the internal think-tank of the British Council commissioned her to write Unbounded Freedom: a guide to creative commons thinking for cultural organisations. She edited The Convention on Modern Liberty: The British debate on fundamental rights and freedoms (Imprint Academic 2010) in the year in which she became Editor of openDemocracy. She has a Cambridge doctorate on eighteenth century literature.

Fernando Casal Bértoa is an Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham (United Kingdom). He is member of the OSCE/ODIHR “Core Group of Political Party Experts”. He is also Co-chair of the Council for European Studies’ Research Network on “Political Parties, Party Systems and Elections” as well as Research theme director at the Nottingham Interdisciplinary Centre for Economic and Political Research. His work has been published in European Journal of Political Research, Sociological Methods and Research, West European Politics, Party Politics, Democratization, European Constitutional Law Review, among others. Currently he is co-writing a book for OUP titled Party System Closure: Alliances and Innovations in Europe between 1848 and 2016".

Andries du Toit has a PhD in Comparative Studies from the University of Essex. His training is in political theory and in qualitative and anthropological approaches to social science research. He has done extensive research on the political economy of structural poverty and racialised inequality in a range of contexts in South Africa: his publications include work on the social relations of labour on commercial fruit and wine farms in the Western Cape, on chronic and structural poverty in the rural and urban Western Cape and in the Eastern Cape, and on the dynamics of marginalised livelihoods and informal social protection in the migrant networks of the Eastern and Western Cape.