Peter Gowan (1946-2009) taught international relations for many years at London Metropolitan University. He was the author of The Global Gamble and A Calculus of Power, co-editor of The Question of Europe, cofounder of the journal Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, and a longstanding member of the editorial board of New Left Review-who published an interview with Peter Gowan along with an obituary in Sept-Oct 2009.

Göran Therborn is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. His works have been published in at least twenty-four languages and include Inequalities of the World; Asia and Europe in Globalization; and Between Sex and Power.

Guy Standing is director of the Socio-Economic Programme of the International Labour Organisation. He directed the ILO's technical programme in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s and was an advisor to the South African government in 1995-96. He has written extensively on labour market and social policy issues.

Jürgen Habermas was born in 1929, and grew up in Gummersbach, Germany. He was educated at the Universities of Gottingen, Bonn, and Zurich, after which he worked for a while as a freelance journalist. In 1956 he became Adorno's assistant at the University of Frankfurt. From 1961 to 1964 he taught philosophy in Heidelberg, and from 1964 to 1971, philosophy and sociology in Frankfurt. From 1971 to 1983 he was Director of the Max Planck Institute for Research into the Life Conditions of the Scientific-Technical World, in Sternberg. Among his influential publications in English are: Knowledge and Human Interests (1971), Theory and Practice (1973), The Theory of Communicative Action (1984/1987), and Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1990).