Vera Axyonova is Marie Skłodowska-Curie REWIRE Fellow at the University of Vienna, and Principal Investigator of the project ‘Expert Knowledge in Times of Crisis’. Her research interests span the study of international crisis and conflict management, cross-border transfer of norms and practices, and expert knowledge production. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Global Security Studies, Ethnopolitics, and East European Politics and Societies, among others. She is the founding co-chair of the ECPR Research Network on Statehood, Sovereignty and Conflict. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences.

Katsiaryna Lozka is a PhD fellow in Political Science at Ghent University. Her doctoral research focuses on the technologies of violence and strategies of resistance in Belarus and Ukraine. Previously, she was a research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Belarus Observatory (2023), a visiting researcher at the University of Vienna (2023), University of Tartu (2022), and a research fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the US.

Diane Stone is Professor of Global Policy in the Florence School of Transnational Governance. Previously, she was Dean of the School of Public Policy at Central European University in Budapest and Vienna. Her research interests include the influence of ideas and expertise on policy, the political economy of higher education; the ‘new diplomacy’; the study of policy networks; international philanthropy; policy transfer and translation; think tanks and policy advice. Her most recent book publications are The Oxford Handbook of Global Policy and Transnational Education, edited with Kim Moloney (OUP 2019), and the open access book Making Global Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2019).