Ana E. Juncos is Professor of European Politics at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol. She is also a visiting Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges and the European Diplomatic Academy. Her primary research interest lies in European foreign and security policy, with a particular focus on EU conflict prevention and peacebuiding. Professor Juncos has widely published on European foreign, security and defence policies. She is author of EU Foreign and Security Policy in Bosnia: The Politics of Coherence and Effectiveness (Manchester University Press, 2013) and co-editor of EU Conflict Prevention and Crisis Management (with E. Gross, Routledge, 2011). She has published articles in high-ranking journals such as International Affairs, Journal of European Public Policy and Journal of Common Market Studies. She is currently Editor of the Journal of European Integration.

Marianna Lovato is an Assistant Professor (adjukt) at the Taube Centre for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, within the Faculty of International and Political Studies, Jagiellonian University. Her research interests focus on European foreign and security policy, informality in global governance, and international diplomacy. Dr Lovato earned her PhD in Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin, with a dissertation on the role of informality in EU foreign policy negotiations. Dr Lovato’s work has appeared in the European Journal of International Relations, Contemporary European Politics, the Journal of European Public Policy, the Journal of Common Market Studies, and the Journal of European Integration, among others. She is co-leader of the UACES research network RELATE.

Karolina Pomorska is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Political Science, Leiden University, in the Netherlands, where she also held a Jean Monnet Chair. Before, Karolina worked at the University of Cambridge and Maastricht University. She has worked on socialization and negotiations in the Council of the EU, informal aspects of decision-making and the EU’s response to Russia’s aggression on Ukraine. Karolina is currently working on a monograph on populist foreign policies and the impact they have had on the EU’s foreign and security policy and co-leads a project on the agency of Central Eastern European states in International Relations and in the EU. The latter emphasizes the issues of informal hierarchies and strive for recognition from the region.

Gergana Noutcheva is Associate Professor in International Relations and European Foreign Policy at the Political Science Department of Maastricht University, The Netherlands. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Pittsburgh, USA (2006). Her research focuses on comparative democratization of Eastern Europe. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Common Market Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, West European Politics, East European Politics and Societies, Journal of European Integration, Democratization, International Spectator, Geopolitics. Prior to joining Maastricht University, she was Research Fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels (2002-2006) where she published a number of policy reports and briefs on the EU enlargement policy and the European Neighborhood Policy.

António Raimundo is a Steering Committee member of the Young ECPR Network on Europeanisation. He is a Researcher at the Research Centre in Political Science of University of Minho and at the Centre for International Studies of Iscte-University Institute of Lisbon. He has also been Guest Lecturer in several Portuguese universities. He holds a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research bridges the fields of International Relations, Foreign Policy Analysis and European Studies, having covered topics such as foreign policy Europeanization, Brexit, EU foreign policy, EU-Africa relations and Portuguese foreign policy. He has led and participated in several research projects with competitive funding. His work has been published in Journal of European Integration, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, European Politics and Society, International Politics, among others.