Andrey Makarychev is guest professor at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Science at the University of Tartu. His areas of expertise include EU-Russia studies, the EU-Russia common neighborhood, and regionalism in the post-Soviet space. He is coauthor (with Alexandra Yatsyk) of Celebrating Borderlands in a Wider Europe: Nations and Identities in Ukraine, Georgia and Estonia (Nomos, 2016) and Lotman's Cultural Semiotics and the Political (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017). His articles appeared in Russian Politics, Region: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Ethnopolitics, Geopolitics, Slavic Review, Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe , and other academic outlets. Thomas Kruessmann is Senior Research Associate with the Global Europe Centre of the University of Kent and coordinator of the Erasmus+ CBHE project "Modernisation of master programmes for future judges, prosecutors, investigators with respect to European standard on human rights" with the University of Graz. As President of the Association of European Studies for the Caucasus, he devotes himself to European Studies in the wider region. Prof. Kruessmann is a German-qualified lawyer with extensive legal practice in one of Vienna's leading law firms.

He was founding director of the Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies Centre at the University of Graz (2010-2015) and Visiting Professor at Kazan Federal University (2015-2016). Beyond the Caucasus, his research interests extend to issues of comparative, European, and international criminal law, gender and the law as well as corruption and compliance. He is chair of the Supervisory Board of Higher School of Jurisprudence / Higher School of Economics in Moscow and maintains close relations with a number of leading universities in Russia, Ukraine, and Central Asia.