Researchers
Aries A. Arugay
Aries A. Arugay is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science, University of the Philippines Diliman. His research interests are civil-military relations, comparative democratization, security sector reform, and international relations of Southeast Asia. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Asian Politics & Policy, an academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell and the Policy Studies Organisation. Aries is also a Senior Fellow and Coordinator of the Philippine Studies Programme of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies-Yusof-Ishak Institute (Singapore). He was a visiting scholar in the Universidad Mayor de San Simon (Bolivia), Chulalongkorn University (Thailand), the University of Sydney (Australia), Jeju Peace Institute (South Korea), the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the National Institute of Defense Studies (Japan). Aries is currently a founding trustee of the Manila-based independent think-tank Foundation for the National Interest. He was previously affiliated with Philippine think tanks such as the Institute for Strategic and Development Studies, Inc. and the Asia-Pacific Pathways to Progress Foundation. His latest book is titled Games, Changes, and Fears: The Philippines from Duterte to Marcos Jr. (2024)
Eileen Babbitt
Eileen Babbitt is Professor of International Conflict Management Practice at the Fletcher School of Global Affairs at Tufts University. Her 30+ years of practice as a facilitator, trainer, and mediation specialist has included work in the Middle East, the Balkans, and with the United Nations (UNDP, UNHCR, UNAMI), U.S. government agencies (USAID, US Department of State), regional inter-governmental organisations (African Union, OSCE), and international and local NGOs. Dr. Babbitt holds a Master’s Degree in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, and a Ph.D. from MIT. Publications include: “The Responsibility to Protect: Time to Re-Assess.” Journal of Human Rights Practice. (2017); “The Pragmatics of Peace with Justice: The Challenge of Integrating Mediation and Human Rights.” in Coleman, Deutsch, and Marcus. The Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice, Third Edition (2014); “Mediation and the prevention of mass atrocities.” in Serrano and Weiss (eds.) The International Politics of Human Rights: Rallying to the R2P Cause? (2014); and “Preventive Diplomacy by Intergovernmental Organizations: Learning from Practice.” International Negotiation (2012).
Heidi and Guy Burgess
Heidi and Guy Burgess have been partners personally and professionally since the early 1970s. Together with several colleagues, they established the Conflict Information Consortium at the University of Colorado (which they have co-directed since its inception in the late 1980s). While having now “retired” from the University, they continue to run the Consortium as a free-standing entity. Working at the intersection of research, theory, and practice, their substantive focus has long been on large-scale, intractable conflicts; their procedural interests have focused on using information technology as a tool to share conflict and peacebuilding-related insights as widely as possible. These efforts led them to create, with contributions from hundreds of colleagues, the continually expanding Beyond Intractability Knowledge Base system. In 2016, they began focusing particularly on the hyper-polarised political conflicts that were threatening the viability of democratic systems in the United States and so many other countries. They started a new project called the Constructive Conflict Initiative as “a call for a dramatically expanded, long-term effort to improve society’s ability to constructively address the full scale and complexity of the challenges posed by destructive conflict.” In 2021, this Initiative developed into a collaboration with the Conflict Resolution Quarterly to convene an online discussion focused on reducing hyper-polarisation and strengthening liberal democracy both in the U.S. and abroad. The Burgesses have written extensively on all aspects of intractable conflict. As part of their commitment to making information freely available, they have mostly published these materials on Beyond Intractability rather than through pricey conventional publishing channels.
Daniela Campello
Daniela Campello is an Associate Professor of Politics and Global Affairs at the Getulio Vargas Foundation’s Business and Policy School (EBAPE), and a senior researcher at the Brazilian Center for International Relations (CEBRI). She is also a member of the Working Group on Reimagining Global Economic Governance, an initiative led by the Carnegie’s New Global Order and Institutions program, with support from the Hewlett Foundation. Campello served as associate fellow at the Wilson Center, in Washington D.C. (2021-2022), as CAF visiting Fellow at St. Anthony’s College, and as a research fellow at the Nuffield College and the Blavatnik School of International Affairs, at Oxford (2017-2018). Before joining EBAPE, she was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Politics and at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, at Princeton University (2009-13). Campello teaches courses and conducts research on topics at the frontier of politics and economics, with a particular focus on the consequences of economic internationalization to domestic politics in emerging democracies. Campello is the author of The Politics of Market Discipline in Latin America (2015), and co-author of The Volatility Curse (2020). The work was also published in leading political science journals like the Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies and the Review of International Political Economy, among others. Prior to entering academic life, she worked as a business consultant at Accenture, as a sell-side financial analyst at BTG Pactual, and also for the Rio de Janeiro state government, where she managed projects funded by international financial institutions.
Debasish Roy Chowdhury
Debasish Roy Chowdhury is a journalist and author, having co-authored ‘To Kill A Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism’ (2021) with John Keane. Based in Hong Kong, where he worked most recently for the South China Morning Post, he has lived and worked in Calcutta, São Paulo, Hua Hin, Bangkok, and Beijing, and reported from Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Nepal and Qatar. He is also a Jefferson Fellow and recipient of multiple journalism awards. His work in recent years has appeared in the New York Times, TIME Magazine, Haaretz and the South China Morning Post, among others.
Kevin P. Clements
Kevin P. Clements is the Director of Toda Peace Institute and Foundation Chair of Peace and Conflict Studies and former Director of the New Zealand National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (NCPACS) at the University of Otago, New Zealand. For several years, he served as Secretary General of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA), President of the IPRA Foundation and Secretary General for IPRA’s Asia-Pacific region (APPRA). He was also Secretary General of International Alert, London, Lynch Professor and Director of Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (ICAR) at George Mason University, and Head of the Peace Research Centre at Australian National University. He has been a regular consultant to a variety of non-governmental, governmental and intergovernmental organisations on conflict resolution, peacebuilding, disarmament and arms control, and human security issues. Dr. Clements has received the New Zealand Peace Foundation’s 2014 Peace Award, the 2022 Distinguished Scholar Award and the 2022 Luxembourg Peace Prize.
Olivia Stokes Dreier
Olivia Stokes Dreier is the Senior Research Fellow for the Toda Peace Institute’s Global Challenges to Democracy focus area. She is the former Executive Director of the Karuna Center for Peacebuilding where she now serves as a Senior Peacebuilding Advisor. She has extensive international experience in peacebuilding, dialogue, and reconciliation programming at all levels of society from national and regional governing bodies to networks of community-based organisations. She has led projects in more than twenty conflict-affected countries, primarily in Africa, South Asia, the Balkans, and the Middle East. She also directed a graduate certificate program in peacebuilding at the School of International Training in Vermont, conducted conflict assessments for USAID, and developed an early response to early warning framework for ECOWAS (the Economic Community of West African States). One of her current interests is the intersection of peacebuilding and democratic resilience.
Robert Kaufman
Robert Kaufman is Distinguished Professor of Political Science Emeritus, Rutgers University. His current research focuses on backsliding in Latin America, the United States, and Western Europe. His most recent books are Backsliding: Democratic Regress in the Contemporary World (2021) and Dictators and Democrats: Elites, Masses, and Regime Change, (2016), co-winner of the Best Book Prize awarded by the Comparative Democratisation Section of the American Political Science Association. Other books include Development, Democracy, and Welfare States: Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe (2008), coauthored with Stephan Haggard, and The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions (1995), co-authored with Stephan Haggard, which won the 1995 Luebbert Prize for the best book in comparative politics, awarded by the Comparative Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.
John Keane
Born in southern Australia, John Keane was educated in Adelaide, Toronto, Cambridge and Berlin. He is currently Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney. A good part of his life has been devoted to trying to think and write creatively about politics, history, media and democracy. Under the pseudonym Erica Blair, his first writings were about the meaning and significance of civil society. In early 1989, in London, he founded the world’s first Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD); more recently, he designed and launched the Democracy Lighthouse platform. His books have been published in more than three dozen languages and he has also contributed interviews and articles to global platforms such as The New York Times, Al Jazeera, South China Morning Post, The Guardian, Letras libres, and theTimes Literary Supplement. He has been nominated for the Balzan Prize (Italy) and the Holberg Prize (Norway) for outstanding global contributions to the human sciences. His latest books include The New Despotism (2020), The Shortest History of Democracy (2022), translated into more than a dozen languages, China’s Galaxy Empire: Wealth, Power, War, and Peace in the New Chinese Century (2024), and Thinking About Democracy in Turbulent Times: Sorbonne Lectures (2025).
Wolfgang Merkel
Wolfgang Merkel was Director of the department “Democracy and Democratisation” at the Social Science Research Centre Berlin (WZB) and Professor of Political Science at the Humboldt University Berlin from 2004-2020. Wolfgang was also Professor of Political Science at the Universities of Mainz (1995-1998) and the University of Heidelberg. He held visiting professorships at universities in Madrid, Sydney, and at the Hertie School of Governance, Berlin. Since 2021 he has served as a senior scholar at the Democracy Institute/CEU in Budapest. He has been a member of a number of academic key bodies, including the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He is also a non-party member of the Basic Values Commission of the Executive Committee of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). He has been a political advisor to several social democratic governments in Europe. His recent books in English include: (jointly edited with Anna Lührmann) Resilience of Democracies: responses to illiberal and authoritarian challenges (2023), Special Issue of “Democratization”, (2021); Democracy and Crisis. Challenges in Turbulent Times (ed., together with Sascha Kneip and Bernhard Wessels 2020); The Struggle over borders. Cosmopolitanism and Communitarianism (ed together with: De Wilde, Koopmans, Strijbis, Zürn, (2019 CUP); Past, Present and Future of Democracy – Policy Review (2019); Handbook of Political, Social, and Economic Transformation (2019).
Larbi Sadiki
Larbi Sadiki is Fellow of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science, based at Chiba University, Japan. Previously, Sadiki held academic positions and professorships at Australian National University, Canberra, University of Exeter, UK, Qatar University, and the Middle East Council on Global Affairs in Doha. His books include The Search for Arab Democracy (2004), Rethinking Arab Democratization (2009), Routledge Handbook of the Arab Spring (2015), Routledge Handbook of Middle East Studies (2020) and the recently-published book with Layla Saleh, Revolution and Democracy in Tunisia (2024). His papers have been published by, among other outlets, International Journal of Middle East Studies, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Political Studies, Digest of Middle East Studies, The Journal of North African Studies and The International Spectator, Aljazeera, Eurozine, The New York Times, and OpenDemocracy.
Peter Woodrow
Peter Woodrow is theoretically retired and serves as a Senior Advisor to the Corruption, Justice and Legitimacy Program at Besa Global. He has been a leading thinker in the application of systems thinking concepts and tools to context analysis and program design in peacebuilding and anti-corruption. He was the Executive Director of CDA Collaborative Learning Projects from 2013 to 2017 and the Co-Director of CDA’s Reflecting on Peace Practice Program (RPP) from 2003 to 2013. He continues to provide consulting services in the peacebuilding arena. In 2018, with co-author Diana Chigas, Peter published Adding Up to Peace, the result of ten years of RPP research on how peacebuilding efforts create momentum towards peace. Prior to joining CDA, Peter was a Partner at the mediation organisation CDR Associates in Boulder, Colorado. He is an experienced mediator, facilitator, and conflict resolution trainer.