Politics

Ricardo Borges de Castro is a European and global affairs analyst with more than 25 years’ experience in international relations, public policies and the strategic perspective. He is a guest columnist at Sábado magazine, a senior adviser at the European Policy Centre (EPC) and a senior non-resident fellow for the strategic perspective at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP).
His areas of interest focus on geopolitics, the international role of the EU and the future of Europe, transatlantic relations and global trends and scenarios.
He was a visiting researcher at the College of Europe from April to December 2024 and associate director and director of the Europe in the World project at the EPC, a think tank based in Brussels.
He was a Member of Cabinet under José Manuel Barroso, former President of the European Commission, and held positions in the office of the Prime Minister and in the Portuguese parliament.
He has a Master's in Arts (MALD) from the Fletcher School and a PhD in International Relations from the University of Oxford (St Antony's College).

Last updated: april 2026

Author of two New York Times bestsellers – «Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?» and «So Here’s the Thing» – and co-host of Hysteria, a podcast produced exclusively by women at Crooked Media. Between 2022 and 2014, she was Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations at the White House. She previously held various positions in President Barak Obama's administration, in the areas of campaigns, political action and the Senate office.
She was Chief Operating Officer of Vice Media, President of Global Communications and Strategy at A&E Networks. She currently serves on the boards of the nonpartisan voter registration organisation, Headcount, the Honors College at the University of Vermont, and the Board of Visitors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Specialist in International Relations, professor and researcher at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He was a professor at the University of Coimbra (Portugal). He did a Master’s degree in International Politics at the University of Aberystwyth (UK). He holds a PhD in Critical Security Studies, also from Aberystwyth, with a thesis on the reform of police forces as a US foreign policy tool in the context of post-conflict state-building. He was a researcher at the Centre for Global Studies at George Mason University in Washington.

Last updated: March 2023

Professor of Political Science at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (CERI Sciences Po) in Paris.
A senior researcher in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford, he is also co-director of the Oxford Martin Programme on African Governance.
Soares de Oliveira has conducted extensive fieldwork on the international political economy of African states, focusing on extractive industries, the financial sector, conflict and post-conflict reconstruction and Afro-Asian relations. He is the author of several books.

Last updated: November 2025

José Pedro Monteiro is an assistant researcher at the University of Coimbra Centre for the History of Society and Culture. He has a PhD in History (ICS-UL, 2017), with a thesis on the internationalisation processes of the issue of «indigenous labour».
José regularly publishes articles on this and other topics in national and international journals, and he wrote the book «Portugal e a Questão do Trabalho Forçado: Um Império Sob Escrutínio (1944-1962)» (Edições 70, 2018).

Last updated: August 2025

He is Professor of Political Science at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and has a PhD from the Juan March Institute (Madrid). He holds an ICREA Academia Award (2019-2024). His research interests focus on the political consequences of electoral laws, political behaviour and political parties. He is editor-in-chief of Frontiers in Political Science, the section on Elections and Representation, and associate editor of the International Journal of Public Opinion Research.

Last updated: March 2023