Leonid Issaev is a senior lecturer at the Department for Asian and African Studies at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (Russia). He is the Deputy Chair of the Laboratory for Sociopolitical Destabilization Risk Monitoring at the National Research University - Higher School of Economics (Russia) and a senior research fellow at the Institute for African Studies at the Center for Civilization and Regional Studies, which is part of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). He is a member of the Scientific Council of the Russian Political Sciences Association (RPSA) and the Russian Sociological Society. He teaches courses in Islamic political philosophy and political systems and political processes in the Arab world. Andrey Zakharov is an associate professor at the Department of History, Political Science, and Law at the Russian State University of Humanities. The area of his research is comparative federalism, on which he has published several books. Additionally, he is an editor of one of the leading intellectual periodicals in Russia. From 1990 to 1995 he served as a member of the Russian parliament.

He is an expert of The Gorbachev Foundation.