Serge Schmemann is a member of the editorial board of The New York Times focusing on international issues. Before that he was the editorial page editor of the International Herald Tribune in Paris for 10 years, joining shortly after the IHT became a part of The New York Times. Mr. Schmemann joined The Times in December 1980 after eight years with The Associated Press, and worked for many years as a correspondent and bureau chief in Johannesburg, Moscow, Bonn, Jerusalem and the United Nations. He was deputy foreign editor of The New York Times from 1999 to 2001. Mr. Schmemann was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for his coverage of the reunification of Germany, and an Emmy in 2003 for his work on a television documentary about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is a graduate of Harvard College and holds an M.A. from Columbia University, as well as an honorary doctorate from Middlebury College, Vermont. Mr. Schmemann is the author of “Echoes of a Native Land: Two Centuries of a Russian Village,” and another, intended for high school students, “When the Wall Came Down: The Berlin Wall and the Fall of Communism,” as well as numerous articles and reviews. Mr. Schmemann resides with his wife in Paris.

Born in Canada and educated at the University of Toronto and Harvard, Michael Ignatieff is a university professor, writer and former politician. His major publications are “The Needs of Strangers,” (1984); “Scar Tissue,” (1992); “Isaiah Berlin: A Life,” (1998); “The Rights Revolution,” (2000); “Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry,” (2001); “The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror,” (2004); “Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics,” (2013); and “The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World,” (2017). Between 2006 and 2011, Mr. Ignatieff served as an M.P. in the Parliament of Canada and then as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and leader of the opposition. He is a member of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada and holds eleven honorary degrees. Between 2012 and 2015 he served as centennial chair at the Carnegie Council on Ethics in International Affairs in New York. Mr. Ignatieff was Edward R. Murrow professor of the practice of the press, politics and public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University from 2014 to 2016. Mr. Ignatieff is currently the rector and president of Central European University in Budapest.

Dr. Heather Grabbe is director of the Open Society European Policy Institute, the European Union policy arm of the Open Society Foundations established by George Soros. From 2004 to 2009 she was senior advisor to Olli Rehn, European commissioner for enlargement, responsible in his cabinet for the Balkans and Turkey. Before joining the Commission, she was deputy director of the Center for European Reform, the independent London-based think tank. Her academic experience includes research at the European University Institute in Florence and Chatham House in London, She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Oxford, and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham. She has also taught at the London School of Economics. Dr. Grabbe has published widely on a range of European issues. Her publications include “Can the EU Survive Populism?” co-authored with Stefan Lehne in 2016, and “The EU's Transformative Power: Europeanization through Conditionality in Central and Eastern Europe, published in 2006.

Ivan Krastev is the chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria and permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna. A highly regarded expert on Balkan and European affairs, he is a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, and sits on the board of trustees of the International Crisis Group and the ERSTE Foundation, as well as the advisory councils of the Open Society Foundations, the Center for European Policy Analysis, and the European Cultural Foundation. He is also a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times International Edition covering Central and Eastern European politics and culture. Mr. Krastev has held fellowships at St. Antony’s College, Oxford; the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, Washington, D.C.; the Collegium Budapest; the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin; the Institute of Federalism at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland; and the Remarque Institute at New York University. From 2004 to 2006, Mr. Krastev was the executive director of the International Commission on the Balkans. From 2005 to 2011, he was editor in chief of the Bulgarian edition of Foreign Policy. A renowned political scientist, he has published widely and is frequently invited to speak at leading international events and conferences. His latest books in English are “After Europe,” published by Penn Press in May 2017; “Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest,” published by Penn Press in 2014; and “In Mistrust We Trust: Can Democracy Survive When We Don't Trust Our Leaders?” published by TED Books in 2013. Mr. Krastev lives in Sofia.

Born in Prague, Michael Žantovský is a diplomat, politician, writer, and translator. Mr. Žantovský attended the Charles University in Prague and the McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. After working at a psychiatric research institute, he then worked as a freelance translator, lyricist and publicist, eventually serving as the Prague correspondent for Reuters from 1988 to 1989. During the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Mr. Žantovský was among the founding members of the Civic Forum, the umbrella reform movement working from the basement of the Laterna Magika theater in Prague to mount opposition to the Communist regime and coordinate its overthrow. From 1990, he was spokesman and press secretary for President Václav Havel, before being appointed ambassador to the United States in 1992. In 1996 he was elected to the Senate of the Parliament of the Czech Republic, and served as chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defense and Security. He then served as ambassador to Israel from 2003 until 2009, and then as ambassador to the United Kingdom until 2015. He has served as president of the Aspen Institute in Prague since 2012, and as executive director of the Václav Havel Library in Prague since 2015. He has translated numerous works of fiction, drama and poetry as well as several works of nonfiction. He has also authored and published many papers and articles relating to current affairs, foreign policy and literature. His biography of long-time friend and former president Václav Havel, “Havel: A Life,” was published in English, Czech and several other languages in 2014.

Péter Krekó is a social psychologist and political scientist. He is a senior affiliate and former director of of Political Capital, a policy research, analysis and consulting institute founded in 2001 in Budapest, Hungary. The institute has developed an extended network of professional partners domestically and internationally, and has become one of the most influential think tanks in Central and Eastern Europe. Mr. Krekó is currently a Fulbright visiting professor at the Central Eurasian Studies Department of Indiana University in the United States. He is also associate professor of social and political psychology at Eötvös Loránd University of Sciences (ELTE) in Budapest. His main research interests focus on Russian soft power policies, political populism and extremism in Europe, the social psychology of conspiracy theories and political violence, and the politics of Central and Eastern Europe. Mr. Krekó is also a member of the presidential board of the Hungarian Political Science Association. In addition, he is an expert member of European Commission’s Radicalization Awareness Network (RAN) Center of Excellence, where he was previously co-chair of RAN PREVENT, the working group on early interventions to prevent violent extremism. He is a member of the International Consortium on Closing Civic Space (iCon) project of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He completed a master’s degree in psychology in 2004, another in political science in 2008, and a Ph.D. focusing on the social psychology of conspiracy theories in 2014, all at ELTE University, Budapest. He is a regular commentator in the international media, and a regular contributor to the Reconnecting Europe Series of Heinrich-Böll Stiftung European Union in Brussels, alongside numerous academic journals.

Václav Štětka is an academic and researcher in the field of media and communication. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from Masaryk University in Brno, the Czech Republic, where he then worked as an assistant professor in the Department of Media Studies and Journalism. Between 2009 and 2013 he was a senior research fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford, working on a project funded by the European Research Council on media and democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. Between 2013 and 2015 he worked as a senior researcher at the Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism, Charles University in Prague, where he established and led the Political Communication Research Group (PolCoRe) which focuses on the role of social media in political communication and civic participation. He was forced to leave the Institute in 2015 after exposing the unethical publishing practices of some members of staff. In 2016 he joined the Department of Social Studies, Loughborough University, becoming lecturer and member of the new Center for Research in Communication and Culture. Dr. Štětka‘s research interests encompass political communication, media ownership and journalistic autonomy, with a particular focus on Central and Eastern Europe. He currently serves as vice chair of the political communication section of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA), the international online forum promoting the exchange of ideas between communication scholars throughout Europe and beyond. He is also a member of several pan-European research networks and projects, including Media Pluralism Monitor in cooperation with the European Commission, the Reuters Institute Digital News Report at the University of Oxford, and an action on populist political communication in Europe under the auspices of the COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) framework.

Beata Balogová is the editor in chief of the SME daily newspaper, one of the major independent dailies in the Slovak Republic. She is also a member of the International Press Institute (IPI) executive board. Ms. Balogová has a degree cum laude from Comenius University in Bratislava, majoring in journalism, and was a Fulbright scholar of the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri, Columbia. She subsequently graduated with a master’s degree in journalism from the School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York in 2007. Ms. Balogová joined the SME in December 2014. Prior to this, she served as editor in chief of Slovakia’s English-language weekly The Slovak Spectator between 2003 and 2014. Previously, she worked for Slovakia’s first and largest private newswire, SITA Slovak News Agency, and the state newswire, TASR. She is one of the co-organizers of the Best Media Traditions program, which brings Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists to Slovakia. Ms. Balogová currently lives in Bratislava.

Miklós Haraszti is a Hungarian author, professor, and human rights promoter. He was a founder of Hungary’s human rights and free press movement in the 1970s, and a member of Parliament in the 1990s. From 2004 to 2010, he was appointed to serve as representative on freedom of the media with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (O.S.C.E.). He has headed several election observation missions for the O.S.C.E.’s monitoring arm, the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (O.D.I.H.R.) Since 2012, he has been the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Belarus. He has taught at several universities, including Columbia University, New York, and Central European University (CEU), Budapest. He is a fellow at the Center for Media, Data and Society at CEU School of Public Policy, and director of research on human rights at CEU’s Center for European Neighborhood Studies. He has published widely and is frequently invited to comment in the international media. His books include “A Worker in a Worker’s State,” and “The Velvet Prison: Artists Under State Socialism.” He co-authored “Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace” in 2010.

Wojciech Przybylski is editor in chief of Visegrad Insight, an analysis and opinion journal led by accomplished editors from the four-nation Visegrad Group, also known as the Visegrad Four or V4, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Its aim is to provide a platform for high-profile debate on the perspectives and challenges for cooperation among the Central European governments, businesses and communities. He is,also chairman of its publishing house, Res Publica Foundation in Warsaw. Previously Mr. Przybylski was editor in chief of Eurozine, a network of European cultural journals based in Vienna. He is a founder of the New Europe 100 project bringing forward a community of successful innovators from Central and Eastern Europe across the fields of business, research, media, nonprofit and public administration run jointly by Res Publica, The Financial Times and Google. Mr. Przybylski is a political commentator, lecturer and social entrepreneur. His expertise includes European and trans-Atlantic affairs, as well as policies related to innovation and culture. His forthcoming book, “Understanding Central Europe,” co-edited with Marcin Moskalewicz, will be published by Routledge later this year.