Issue 7 | Contributors

Sergio Aguilar is Full Professor at the Sao Paulo State University (UNESP), Brazil, where he coordinates the Graduate Program in International Relations San Tiago Dantas (UNESP/UNICAMP/PUC-SP). He holds a PhD in history (UNESP) and received a “Researcher on Productivity” scholarship from the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).

Léopold Beyaert completed his doctoral thesis at UCLouvain. Entitled Yoiks of Young Sámi in a time of Green Extractivism, it is an ethnography based on a 14-month fieldwork among a Sámi indigenous community in the village of Jåhkåmåhkke (Sábme, Sweden). He explores the Sámi oral tradition, particularly the practice of juoigat (yoiking) and its contemporary uses in community health and resilience, decolonization, and democratic participation.  
 
Hélène B. Ducros (JD and PhD, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill) is a human geographer whose research focuses on the reinvention of rural territories and identities and the international circulation of models of placemaking through heritage-making. She has published articles and book chapters in various venues and co-edited Decentering European Studies: Perspectives on Europe from its Beyond (UNESP – World Society Foundation, 2025) and Justice in Climate Action Planning (Springer, 2022). She is the founding editor of GlobalEurope Journal.
Sara Fusco is an adjunct at the Faculty of Law, University of Akureyri, Iceland. She holds a PhD in law from the University of Lapland, Finland, where her doctoral research examined the intersections of constitutional law, Indigenous Peoples’ rights, and environmental justice in the Arctic. Her broader research interests include environmental constitutionalism, Indigenous rights, and the legal dimensions of environmental governance, with a particular focus on the Arctic region. At the University of Akureyri, she teaches international law, comparative law, human rights law, and legal theory. She also serves as Thesis Coordinator for the Polar Law Programme.

Charlotte Halpern holds a PhD in political science and is an FNSP senior research fellow with tenure at Sciences Po, Centre for European studies and comparative politics (CEE), CNRS, France. She has done extensive teaching and research on state restructuring, comparative climate governance and the selection of policy instruments. Her current research focuses on the governing of ecological transitions, with a focus on urban sustainable mobility and climate action, and in a comparative perspective. She is the co-director of the LIEPP (Laboratory for interdisciplinary evaluation of public policies) environmental policy research group and the Sciences Po executive master programme “Regional governance and urban development”. She is an elected member of the International Public Policy Association (IPPA)’s executive committee.

Eleni Kavvatha is an international studies graduate, currently a researcher at the Centre of Research in Political Science at UCLouvain – Saint Louis in Brussels (CReSPO). Her research is focused on the impact of EU environmental policies on the Sami Indigenous people in the European Arctic region. She has conducted research in Belgium, Iceland, Svalbard, Greenland, Norway, and the Finnish Lapland. Her research interests revolve around democratic dynamics in the EU’s external relations in the High North, non-state actors in the Arctic, Indigenous Peoples organizations, arctic communities, arctic governance, EU environmental policies, policy complexity and fragmentation, and the EU’s green transition.

Julia Khrebtan-Hörhageris Professor of Communication Studies at Colorado State University (USA). She is Director and Leader of Education Abroad Programs in Rome (Italy) and Vienna (Austria).
 
Samaneh Koohestani Soorchani holds a PhD in cultural sociology and is currently a doctoral researcher at UCLouvain (ARC CLAIM project). Her research sits at the intersection of communication, media, and society, with a particular focus on climate litigation, tactical platformization, and the mediatized visibility of marginalized voices in global environmental and social struggles.
 
Oula-Antti Labba is a lawyer and researcher. He is a Saami from Eanodat in the Finnish part of Sápmi (Saamiland). Labba is a lawyer specialized in human rights issues. He has previously worked at Finnish Ministry of Justice and the Saami Parliament in Finland, among other places.
 
Daria Mishina was born and raised in the Arctic, where she lives. Her academic journey, personal experiences, and long-standing connection to the Arctic have shaped her research focus on Arctic regional development. Now a PhD candidate at the University of Lapland, Finland, she explores alternative pathways and new opportunities for the sustainable development of Arctic regions, seeking to balance economic and social transformation with the preservation of the Arctic heritage.
 
Amandine Orsini is Professor of International Politics and specializes in global environmental politics. She has just finished a project on youth in global environmental negotiations related to climate, biodiversity, and the sustainable development goals. She also started a collective project on international climate litigation by marginalized actors (CLAIM project, 2025-2029) and obtained the renewal of a research project on the EU, Indigenous Peoples, and the Arctic (2024-2028).

Nicholas Ostrum is Assistant Professor of History at Kent State University and holds a PhD from Stony Brook. He has published research and reviews in various fora, including the International History Review, Central European History, Energy Humanities, EuropeNow, Journal of World History, and edited volumes on global Germany. His current project analyzes West Germany’s petroleum, development, and political relations with Syria and Libya from the 1950s through the 1973/4 Oil Crisis.

Christian Suter is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland). He has been a member of the board of the World Society Foundation since 1999 and its president since 2008. His current research focuses on social indicators and quality of life and on globalization and world society. Earlier research focused on social and economic inequalities and poverty, sovereign debt and global debt crises, social and political transformations in Latin America, and social support and health. He has published and edited more than 40 books and special issues, as well as many articles in international social sciences journals, encyclopedias, and volumes. His most recent publications include The Global Politics of Census Taking (Routledge 2024), Measuring Gender Equality (Springer 2023), African-Asian Relations (LIT 2022), Measuring and Understanding Complex Phenomena (Springer 2021), The Middle Class in World Society (Routledge 2020), and Wealth(s) and Subjective Well-being (Springer 2019). He is the winner of the Book Award of the American Sociological Association, Political Economy of the World-System Section (1993; for Debt Cycles in the World-Economy, Westview 1992) and he has been awarded the Fritz Thyssen Prize for articles in social sciences journals (1998), and the Research Fellow Award 2020 from the International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies for substantial contribution to quality-of-life research (2020).

Metehan Tekinırk is Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Colgate University. Prior to joining Colgate in 2023, he was Visiting Lecturer in Political Science and Sociology at Boston University, where he previously earned his MA and PhD degrees in political science after moving from his hometown, Istanbul. His research on democratic erosion and resilience, populism and populist authoritarianism, nationalism and national identities, and the international system has been published in outlets such as the German Journal of Comparative Politics, Populism, EuropeNow, and Politics, Religion & Ideology, among others.

François Thoreau is an associate professor and researcher at the Fund for Scientific Research in Belgium. He is a research sssociate at the Spiral Research Center, University of Liège (ULiège), Belgium. Specializing in science and technology studies (STS) and political ecology, his work explores the intersection of technology, society, and the environment. He is currently the principal investigator of the ERC-funded project “The BoS” (2021–2026), which investigates the impact of genomics and digital infrastructures on cattle breeding and reproduction.

Patrick Ziltener studied sociology, history, and economics in Basel, Berlin (Free University), and Zurich, receiving a PhD from the University of Zurich in 1997. He has been a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG) in Cologne, Germany, the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) and Secretary of the Free Trade and Economic Partnership Agreement (FTEPA) Switzerland-Japan negotiations. Since 2010 he has been doing applied research on free trade agreements (FTAs) sponsored by and in cooperation with business organizations. He was recently Visiting Researcher at Indonesia’s National Research & Innovation Agency BRIN. He has published, among others, in Asian Survey, the International Quarterly for Asian Studies, ASIEN – Quarterly Journal of the German Association for Asian Studies, the Swiss Review of International Economic Relations, the International Journal of Comparative Sociology (IJCS), the Review of International Political Economy (RIPE), and the Journal of World-Systems Research. With Christian Suter, he has edited several books, among them African-Asian Relations: Past, Present, Future (2021) and After Globalization: The Future of World Society  (2024) on behalf of the World Society Foundation (WSF), Zurich, Switzerland.

Art Exhibition | Literary Excerpts

Olivia Baes translated C. F. Ramuz’s 1908 novel Jean-Luc persécuté.

Antonina W. Bouis is one of the leading translators of Russian literature working today. She has translated over eighty works from authors such as Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Mikhail Bulgakov, Andrei Sakharov, Sergei Dovlatov, and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Bouis, previously executive director of the Soros Foundation in the former USSR, lives in New York City.

Paco Cerdà is a journalist and writer. He is the author of multiple award-winning books. The Pawn is the first book of his to be translated into English.

Kevin Gerry Dunn is a Spanish/English translator and a ghostwriter. His translations include The Tyranny of Flies by Elaine Vilar Madruga, Easy Reading by Cristina Morales, and works by Paul B. Preciado, María Bastarós, Daniela Tarazona, and Ousman Umar. He has received an English PEN Award, a PEN/Heim Grant, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

Sergei Lebedev was born in Moscow in 1981 and worked for seven years on geological expeditions in northern Russia and Central Asia. Lebedev is a poet, essayist, and journalist. His novels have been translated into twenty three languages and have received great acclaim in the English-speaking world. The New York Review of Books has hailed Lebedev as “the best of Russia’s younger generation of writers.” He has been awarded the Prix Montluc Résistance et Liberté and currently lives in Germany.

Emma Ramadan is a literary translator based in Providence, Rhode Island. She is the recipient of a PEN/Heim grant, an NEA Translation Fellowship, and a Fulbright for her work on Bouanani.

Charles Ferdinand Ramuz (1878-1947) is the preeminent Francophone Swiss writer of the twentieth century. Often set in remote Swiss villages, his many novels—enigmatic, mystical, apocalyptic—fascinated Céline, Gide, and Giono. Céline predicted that Ramuz would be among a handful of his contemporaries who were going to be read in the year 2000. He also wrote the libretto for his friend Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale.