Kali Akuno is a co-founder and co-director of Cooperation Jackson. He served as the Director of Special Projects and External Funding in the Mayoral Administration of the late Chokwe Lumumba of Jackson, MS.

Slim Amamou is a blogger, activist, and a former Secretary of State for Sport and Youth in the transitional Tunisian government. He resigned from the role in 2011 — protesting the transitional government’s censorship of a number of websites.

Celso Amorim is the longest serving foreign minister of Brazil to date (1993-1994 and 2003-2010). He also served as Minister of Defense (2011-2014). Amorim remains active in academic life and as a public figure, having written a number of books and articles on matters ranging from foreign policy to culture.

Andres Arauz is a former Minister of Knowledge of Ecuador and a former Central Bank General Director. He is a founding member of the Dollarization Observatory and a former board member of the nascent Bank of the South. He is currently based in Mexico City as a Doctoral Fellow at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM.

Niki Ashton is a Member of Parliament for Churchill–Keewatinook Aski. She serves as the NDP’s Critic for Democratic Reform and Transport, and Deputy Critic for Women and Gender Equality.

Renata Ávila is an international human rights lawyer. She is a 2020 Stanford Race and Technology Fellow at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. She is a Board member for Creative Commons, the Common Action Forum, Cities for Digital Rights, Article 19 Mexico & Central America, and a Global Trustee of Digital Future Society. She also serves as a member of the Coordinating Collective of DiEM25.

Edil Baisalov is the current ambassador of Kyrgyzstan in London. A renowned human rights defender and civic activist, Edil played a key role in bringing down authoritarian and corrupt governments in 2005 and 2010. His voice was persistent in the fight against corruption and organised crime, often at great risk to his safety. In 2008-2010 he lived in Sweden as a UNHCR refugee after facing a jail term for his opposition work as executive secretary of the Social Democratic Party of Kyrgyzstan.

Nnimmo Bassey is the director of the Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF). He is a member of the steering committee of Oilwatch International, and was the chair of Friends of the Earth International (2008-2012) and Executive Director of Nigeria’s Environmental Rights Action (1993-2013). He is also a Member of the Action Research Network for a Wellbeing Economy in Africa (WE-Africa).

Sami Ben Gharbia is a Tunisian human rights campaigner, blogger, writer, and freedom of expression advocate. He is the Founding Director of the Advocacy arm of Global Voices Online, the anti-censorship network dedicated to protecting freedom of expression and free access to information online. He is a co-founder of the award-winning collective blog Nawaat, a Tunisian citizen journalism website.

Khaled Ali is a prominent lawyer and advocate of social justice and workers’ rights against corruption in Egypt. He is the former head of the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights (ECESR) and co-founder of the Front for Defending Egypt’s Protesters and the Hisham Mubarak Law Center (HMLC).

Áurea Carolina is a federal deputy for Minas Gerais state (BR), affiliated with the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL). Áurea is part of the Muitas municipalist movement, of #partidA (an informal party composed dedicated to electing women into office), and of the Ocupa Política network (devoted to boosting the occupation of the institutional politics by progressive activists). Together with Andréia de Jesus, Bella Gonçalves, and Cida Falabella, she takes part in the “Gabinetona”, a forum where four parliamentary mandates work collectively.

Alicia Castro is political and union activist. She was was the General Secretary of the Union of Aeronavegantes, the founder of the Argentine Workers Movement (MTA), and a member of the ITF Council. She served as the Argentine ambassador to the United Kingdom from 2012 to 2016. Before that, she served in ambassadorial posts in Venezuela and as the National Deputy for the Province of Buenos Aires.

Noam Chomsky is considered the founder of modern linguistics. He has received numerous awards, including the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, the Helmholtz Medal and the Ben Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science. Chomsky joined the UA in fall 2017, coming from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked since 1955 and was Institute Professor, later Institute Professor emeritus.

Rafael Correa is former Constitutional President of the Republic of Ecuador, 2007- 2017, and Chairman of the Eloy Alfaro Political and Economic Thought Institute (IPPE). Rafael holds a Ph.D. and MSc. in Economics from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a MA in Economics from the Catholic University of Louvain- la-Neuve, Belgium. He obtained his first economics degree from the Catholic University of Santiago de Guayaquil, Guayaquil, Ecuador.

Vanessa Nakate is a climate activist. She was the first Fridays For Future activist in Uganda and founded the Rise up Climate Movement, which seeks to amplify the voices of activists from across Africa. She also spearheaded a campaign to save Congo’s rain forest, which is facing rapid deforestation. She is currently working on a project to install solar panels and stoves in schools.

Jean Drèze is a development economist and Visiting Professor at Ranchi University in India. His recent books include An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions (with Amartya Sen) and Sense and Solidarity: Jholawala Economics for Everyone. Jean is also active in various campaigns for social and economic rights as well as in the worldwide movement for peace and disarmament.

Tasneem Essop is Executive Director of Climate Action Network International (CAN-I). She served in the first democratic provincial parliament in South Africa, and later in the Provincial Cabinet. She was an anti-apartheid activist from an early age in different capacities, student and youth activist, teacher and trade unionist.

Miatta Fahnbulleh has a wealth of experience in developing and delivering policy to empower communities and change people’s lives. She has been at the forefront of generating new ideas on reshaping our economy inside government and out. Prior to joining the New Economics Foundation as Chief Executive she was Director of Policy & Research at the Institute of Public Policy Research. Before this, she has worked at senior levels for the Leader of the Opposition, the Cabinet Office, and the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit in the United Kingdom.

Gael García Bernal is an actor. He began performing in stage productions with his parents in Mexico, and later studied at the Central School for Speech and Drama in London. He is a founder and the president of Ambulante, an itinerant not-for-profit documentary film festival promoting documentaries within Mexico and abroad. He has recently opened his new production company, La Corriente del Golfo, together with Diego Luna.

Alvaro Garcia-Linera is a Bolivian politician from Cochabamba. He led the indigenist Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army rebel group during the early 1990s, and he was imprisoned from 1992 to 1997. In 2005, he was elected Vice President of Bolivia, serving until his resignation in November 2019.

Elizabeth Gómez Alcorta is the Minister of Women, Genders and Diversity of Argentina. Previously, she practiced law from more than twenty years, representing victims of state terrorism and political prisoners. She is also Professor at the University of Buenos Aires, where she teaches criminal law. She has published numerous articles on criminal law, human rights law and gender. She holds a law degree from the University of Buenos Aires and has completed postgraduate studies in law, sociology and political sciences.

Fernando Haddad is a Brazilian politician and academic who served as Minister of Education (2005-2012) in the cabinets of both Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, served as Mayor of São Paulo (2013- 2017), and was the Worker’s Party (PT) candidate in the 2018 presidential elections in Brazil. Haddad holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Law, a Master’s Degree in Economics and a Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of São Paulo (USP). He is a professor of Contemporary Political Theory at USP and of Public Administration at Insper.

Harry Halpin is the CEO of Nym Technologies SA, a Swiss privacy company that produces mixnet technology that can even resist NSA-level surveillance. Previously, he led research projects at Inria, W3C/MIT, and received his Ph.D. from University of Edinburgh in Informatics. He is currently active in the global movement for democratic confederalism as inspired by Rojava.