About us

Yang Jianli is the founder of the pro-democracy organizations Initiatives for China and Foundations for China in the 21st Century. A supporter of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, he was imprisoned for five years and tortured. He holds Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley, and now teaches at Harvard.

Yoani Sánchez is an internationally recognized Cuban blogger, whose blog Generación Y has been blocked by the authorities. The blog is translated by volunteers into over 15 different languages. A philologist, she has published two books, Havana Real: One Woman Fights to Tell the Truth About Cuba Today, and Word Press: A Blog for Speaking To The World.

Thor Halvorssen is a Venezuelan human rights advocate and film producer with contributions in the field of public policy, public interest advocacy, individual rights and civil liberties, and pro-democracy advocacy. He is founder of the Oslo Freedom Forum and President of the Human Rights Foundation.

Manuel Araujo is a Mayor of Quelimane City, Mozambique. He has been a Campaign Coordinator for Amnesty International, London, and was a founder and first Chairperson of the Centre for Mozambican and International Studies (CEMO). He was awarded a PhD in International Development from the University of East Anglia, and also holds degrees from the University of Zimbabwe and the University of London.

Larry Siedentop is a political philosopher and an intellectual historian. He is especially interested in nineteenth-century French liberalism and is the author of the book Democracy in Europe, and an occasional contributor to several major British daily newspapers, including the Financial Times and The Times. In November 2004, Siedentop was invested with a CBE for services to political thought and higher education.

Michael Zöller is Professor of Political Sociology at Bayreuth University and president of the American-European Council on Public Policy. He serves on the board of the Mont Pelerin Society and has published on Political Economy, Comparative Public Policy, the Sociology of Religion and the American Polity.

Fouad Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is a widely published author who wrote The Arab Predicament, The Dream Palace of the Arabs, The Syrian Rebellion, and other works. In 2006, he was awarded the Bradley Prize for Outstanding Achievement and the National Medal of the Humanities.