Leonid Issaev (Ph.D. in Political Science) is currently an associate professor at the Department of Political Science and International Affairs and the Deputy Chair of the Laboratory for Sociopolitical Destabilization Risk Monitoring at the HSE University. He is also the senior research fellow at the Center for Civilization and Regional Studies of the Institute for African Studies, which is part of the Russian Academy of Sciences.He teaches courses in Islamic political philosophy and political systems and political processes in the Arab World. Andrey Zakharov (Ph.D. in Philosophy) is currently an associate professor at the Faculty 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. He is an editor of "Neprikosnovenny Zapas: Debaty o Politike i Kulture" (Neprikosnovenny Zapas: Debates on Politics and Culture) magazine, 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.