Mattia Bottino is an Italian-Brazilian PhD candidate in Public Governance, Management and Policy at the University of Bologna and a member of the INCT Transformações da Participação, do Associativismo e do Confronto (INCT Participa), within the Núcleo Democracia e Ação Coletiva of the Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento (CEBRAP). He holds a BA in Political, Social and International Sciences and an MA in International Relations from the University of Bologna, as well as a practice-oriented master’s degree focused on urban participatory governance, offered jointly by the University of Bologna and the Fondazione per l’Innovazione Urbana. From 2022 to 2025, he worked as a researcher at Eurac Research Institute for Comparative Federalism.

From October to December 2026, he is a Visiting Fellow at the European Centre for Research on Federalism (ECRF) at the University of Tübingen. He has previously held visiting positions at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and at the Centro de Estudos da Metrópole (University of São Paulo and CEBRAP) in São Paulo.

During his stay at the ECRF, he is studying the communal confederal arrangement established in Venezuela under the Bolivarian Revolution, commonly known as the Estado comunal. His research examines the institutional framework of this decolonial form of federalism and its contested character, torn between enabling popular self-government outside the state and buttressing authoritarian rule.

More broadly, his research lies at the intersection of comparative politics and political theory, with a focus on the radical democratic imaginaries advanced across Latin America by a range of socio-political actors, including parties, social movements, working-class organizations, and Indigenous peoples, in both liberal and illiberal contexts.

Further info: https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/mattia.bottino3

Email: mattia.bottino3spam prevention@unibo.it

Dr. Lingkai Kong is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Research & Development Centre on Law and Society (CEDIS), Faculty of Law, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, and a Guest Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Political Science, Istanbul University. He holds a PhD in Political Science and International Relations from Izmir University of Economics, Türkiye, a master’s degree from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and a bachelor’s degree from Beijing Foreign Studies University, China. His research focuses on constitutional history and federal thought, with particular interests in federalism, autonomy, associational democracy, and anarchism.

In September 2026, Dr. Kong is undertaking a one-month research stay as a Visiting Scientist at the European Centre for Research on Federalism (ECRF) at the University of Tübingen, hosted by Prof. Dr. Gabriele Abels. His research focuses on Portugal’s 2018 decentralization reform and its implications for the distribution of political power within the country’s unitary state.

His broader research explores how decentralized political and constitutional arrangements can contribute to social cooperation and collective self-governance in complex and pluralistic societies, with particular interests in decentralization, subsidiarity, federalism, autonomy, and the history of political thought.

Website: www.kong-lingkai.com

Email: lingkai.kongspam prevention@novalaw.unl.pt

Dr. Andrew Khakula is a senior lecturer in the School of Law at Africa Nazarene University in Kenya. He earned his doctorate in law (LLD) from the University of South Africa and is an expert in comparative constitutional law, multi-level governance, sustainable development and human rights.

With the support of a grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG) and The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), Dr. Khakula undertook a research stay at the European Centre for Research on Federalism (ECRF) from July to September 2026, focusing on comparative research on German fiscal federalism.

His project examines how Germany's multi-level government structure—particularly its successful application in reunifying and developing a deeply divided post-Cold War society—can inform best practices for Kenya's fiscal devolution system. Kenya adopted constitutional devolution in the year 2010 and implemented it in 2013 through elected county governments, creating a structure for fiscal, political, and administrative autonomy that Dr. Khakula argues represents a form of federalism on a smaller scale. 

His research aims to identify practical mechanisms for using multi-level governance to address Kenya's historical challenges of poverty and inequitable regional development. Through a combination of desktop research, expert consultations, focus group discussions, and institutional visits at the federal and local levels, Dr Khakula seeks to gather actionable insights to strengthen Kenya's devolved governance framework, particularly in the area of fiscal decentralisation in realising equitable development. 

e-mail: khakulaandrewspam prevention@gmail.com

Uliana Movchan is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science in V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University and an expert at the European Expert Association (Kyiv). Her research interests concern the issues of institutional design, peace-building, Ukrainian political system, patronal politics, power-sharing. She was a Fulbright visiting postgraduate student at the University of California, San Diego, and held a visiting fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto (funded by Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies) and at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (George Washington University).

From May to October 2022, she was a research fellowship in Tübingen funded by the special support programme for researchers@risk from Ukraine. Since November 2022, she has been as a fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.

e-mail: u.movchan@karazin.ua

Prof. Johanna Kantola PhD is a "Distinguished Visiting Professorship for Gender and EU Studies" at IfP from 2022. She was Professor of Gender Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Tampere University (2017-2022). She joined Centre for European Studies (CES) in the University Helsinki as Professor of European Societies and their Politics in November 2022. She obtained her PhD in Politics at the University of Bristol in 2004 and became Docent in Politics at the University of Helsinki in 2007. Her research interests include gender and intersectional perspectives in political science in general, and state, representation and power theory in particular. She is an expert in EU studies, political parties, populism, and the welfare state. She is co-editor of the series "Gender and Politics" at Palgrave Macmillan and has published extensively and in prestigious journals. Her recent book publications include Gender and the Economic Crisis in Europe (2017). Among others, she has successfully secured an ERC Consolidator Grant (2018-2023) for a project Gender, party politics and democracy in Europe: A study of European Parliament's party groups (EUGenDem). In this area she will also offer one seminar per year mainly for Master students. She was a guest at IfP for the first time in May 2022 and offered a block seminar on "Party Politics and Gender in the European Parliament".

Further info at:

https://research.tuni.fi/johannakantola/

e-mail: johanna.kantola@helsinki.fi