Thomas Ertman (b. 1959) is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the College Core Curriculum at New York University. He received his BA in Philosophy and PhD in Sociology from Harvard University, where he was also a faculty member in the Department of Government for ten years. He is author of Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe and editor of Max Weber’s “Economic Ethos of the World Religions”: An Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Philip Gorski (b. 1963) is Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at Yale University. He received his BA from Harvard (1986) and his PhD from Berkeley (1996). His early work focuses on the political development of early modern Europe with special attention to the impact of the Reformation. He recently completed a book on American civil religion, which is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.

Peter Haldén (b. 1977) completed his undergraduate education in Berlin and Stockholm, and he received his PhD at the European University Institute in Florence in 2006. He is currently an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Swedish Defence University (SDU) in Stockholm. His research interests include social theory, state formation, Eurasian history, international politics, and the political use of armed force. At the SDU he teaches courses in military strategy and the political use of military force. Haldén’s recent publications include the monograph Stability without Statehood (Palgrave, 2011); the articles “Reconceptualising state-formation as collective power” (Journal of Political Power, 2014), “A non-sovereign modernity. Attempts to engineer stability in the Balkans 1820–1890” (Review of International Studies, 2013); and the co-edited volume New Agenda for Statebuilding (Routledge, 2013).

Robert H. Holden (b. 1947) holds his PhD (history) from the University of Chicago. He has been Professor of Latin American History at Old Dominion University (Norfolk, Virginia) since 1993. Holden’s research interests include state formation, violence, rule of law and legitimacy. His publications include Armies without Nations: Public Violence and State Formation in Central America, 1821–1960 (Oxford University Press, 2004), Contemporary Latin America: 1970 to the Present (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), and forthcoming essays, “Violence, the State and Revolution in Latin America” for the Cambridge World History of Violence (vol. 4) and “Borderlands and Public Violence in a Shadow Polity: Costa Ricans, Nicaraguans and the Legacy of the Central American Federation” for Politics and History of Violence and Crime in Central America, eds. Sebastian Huhn and Hannes Warnecke (Palgrave Macmillan). Holden’s principal teaching interests include Spain in America, Latin American independence, political order, religion and the state, social revolution, democratization and economic development.

Victoria Tin-bor Hui (b. 1967) is an associate professor in Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. She received her PhD in Political Science from Columbia University and her BSSc from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Hui’s research examines the centrality of war in the formation and transformation of China through the whole span of Chinese history. She is the author of War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2005). She has published the articles “Toward a Dynamic Theory of International Politics” (International Organization), “The Emergence and Demise of Nascent Constitutional Rights” (Journal of Political Philosophy), “History and Thought in China’s Traditions” (Journal of Chinese Political Science), “Building Castles in the Sand” (Chinese Journal of International Politics), and book chapters “The China Dream: Revival of What Historical Greatness?”, “The Triumph of Domination in the Ancient Chinese System” and “Problematizing Sovereignty.” As a native from Hong Kong, Hui also analyses Hong Kong politics. She maintains a blog on the Umbrella Movement (https://victoriatbhui.wordpress.com) and has published the article “Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement: The Protest and Beyond” (Journal of Democracy). Hui teaches courses on the state and contentious politics.

Dietrich Jung (b. 1959) is a professor and Head of Department at the Center for Contemporary Middle East Studies, University of Southern Denmark. He holds an MA in Political Science and Islamic Studies, as well as a PhD from the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences, University of Hamburg, Germany, and has large field experience in the Muslim world. In different capacities Jung has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in International Relations, Islamic Studies, Political Science, Sociology and Middle Eastern Area Studies. He has published numerous scholarly articles on causes of war, peace and conflict studies, political Islam, modern Turkey and on conflicts in the Middle East. His most recent published books are Orientalists, Islamists and the Global Public Sphere: A Genealogy of the Modern Essentialist Image of Islam (Sheffield: Equinox, 2011), and The Politics of Modern Muslim Subjectivities: Islam, Youth and Social Activism in the Middle East, together with Marie Juul Petersen and Sara Lei Sparre (New York: Palgrave, 2014).

Lars Bo Kaspersen (b. 1961) holds a BA (Copenhagen), MA (Copenhagen), MA (Sussex) and PhD (Aarhus). He teaches history, politics and sociology and is currently Professor and Head of the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen. He has published widely on social theory and political sociology and is the author of “Anthony Giddens: An Introduction to a Social Theorist,” and “Denmark in the World.” Kaspersen’s research areas are state formation processes in Europe, the transformation of the welfare state, sociology of war and civil society (including the idea of associative democracy), social theory, in particular relational theory. Together with Norman Gabriel, he is working on a book about Norbert Elias’s political sociology. Kaspersen recently received a grant from the Carlsberg Foundation to study “the civil society in the shadow of the state,” focusing on the role of civil society in the development of the Danish welfare state and its future.

Vivek Swaroop Sharma (b. 1970) holds a BA from Pitzer College (History), MA from Claremont Graduate School (History), MA from New York University (International Relations) and a PhD from Pitzer College (Comparative Politics). He now teaches at Pomona College in Claremont, California. His research interests are focused broadly on problems of social order, conflict and violence with a special focus on religion and violence, state formation and failure, war and conflict, and the historical sociology of power and authority in South Asia and Western Europe. Sharma’s teaching addresses the traditional questions of political science through a historical institutional frame: his recent courses include Religion and Violence, Power and Authority in India, The Social Foundations of Order, Conflict and Violence, Colonialism and Nationalism, Political Authority and State in Europe, War and Society, and State Failure and State Building. His recent publications include “Give Corruption a Chance,” The National Interest, vol. 128 November/December 2013; “A Social Theory of War: Clausewitz and War Reconsidered,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 19 August 2014; “Kinship, Property and Authority,” Politics and Society, 27 February 2015; and “Secularism and Democracy in India,” The National Interest, forthcoming. He is also the author of War, Authority and the State: European State Formation Reconsidered, Cambridge University Press, under review.

Hendrik Spruyt (b. 1956) is the Norman Dwight Harris Professor of International Relations at Northwestern University. He previously taught at Columbia University and Arizona State University. He has also been a visiting faculty member of the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris. He received a Doctorandus from the University of Leiden, School of Law (The Netherlands) in 1983, and his PhD in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego, in 1991. He was Chair of the Department of Political Science at Northwestern from 2005 to 2008, and Director of the Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies from 2008 to 2013. Spruyt has also served as co-editor of The Review of International Political Economy. He has published several books, including The Sovereign State and Its Competitors (Princeton University Press, 1994), which won the Greenstone Prize for best book in History and Politics; Ending Empire: Contested Sovereignty and Territorial Partition (Cornell University Press, 2005), which was a runner-up for the Greenstone Prize in 2006; Global Horizons (University of Toronto, 2009); co-author with Alexander Cooley of Contracting States: Sovereign Transfers in International Relations (Princeton University Press, 2009), and co-editor with Miriam Elman and Oded Haklai of Democracy, Religion, and Conflict: The Dilemmas of Israel’s Peacemaking (Syracuse University Press, 2013).

Among his recent publications are “Empires, Past and Present: The Relevance of Empire as an Analytic Concept,” in Noel Parker, ed., Empire and International Order (2013); “New Institutionalism and International Relations,” in Ronen Palan, ed., Global Political Economy (2012); “Indonesia,” in Richard Caplan, ed., Exit Strategies and State Building (2012).

Jeppe Strandsbjerg (b. 1973) is Associate Professor at the Department of Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School. He is an International Relations scholar with a DPhil in International Relations (Sussex) and master degrees in Political Science (Copenhagen) and International Relations (Aberystwyth, Wales). His research is generally preoccupied with the concept of space in International Relations and the relationship between space and politics. Previously he has analysed the role of cartography in the process where territory emerged as a defining concept for sovereignty in European state formation (Territory, Globalization and International Relations (2010) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). More recently he has been studying the significance of spatial knowledge technologies in Arctic Geopolitics (“Cartopolitics, Geopolitics and Boundaries in the Arctic” in Geopolitics 17(4) 2012). Strandsbjerg is currently working along two tracks dealing with Arctic geopolitics: a project on security, sovereignty and natural resources; and a project investigating the politic impact of sustainability discourse. He teaches courses on International Relations, Globalisation Theory and Political Theory.

Benno Teschke (b. 1967) is currently a Reader in the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom, and an affiliated Visiting Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen. He received his PhD from the International Relations (IR) Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science and was subsequently a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Teschke is the author of The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations (London/New York: Verso), which was awarded the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize in 2004 (translated into German, Japanese, Russian and Turkish). More recently he published in the New Left Review, International Theory and the Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt on Schmitt’s international legal and political thought. Teschke’s research interests comprise IR Theory, International History, Historical Sociology and Marxism.