HIKMA SUMMIT
OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
SCIENTIFIC COUNCIL
The Scientific Council is the academic basis of Hikma's work. Founded in January 2020 and composed of professors from the Department of Political and Social Sciences, it has been the reference body in the academic definition of the Hikma Summit of International Relations; in this sense, the Council has supported Hikma's work by directing the association's attention to the most topical issues of international politics. Moreover, the support of the professors of the Department of Political and Social Sciences has proved to be central in establishing fruitful links with the academic world, both at home and abroad.
Professor
Matteo Dian
Associate professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna. He previously held research and teaching positions at the University of Bologna, the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics and Political Science, the European University Institute and Ca' Foscari University of Venice. He received his Ph.D. from the Scuola Normale Superiore (Italian Institute of Human and Social Sciences) in Florence. He is the author of The Evolution of the US-Japan Alliance: The Eagle and the Chrysanthemum (Elsevier, Oxford 2014) Contested Memories in Chinese and Japanese Foreign Policy (Elsevier, Oxford 2017) and New Regional Initiatives in China's Foreign Policy. The Incoming Pluralism in Global Governance (Palgrave, 2018, with Silvia Menegazzi), and China, the United States and the Future of the International Order (Bologna, Il Mulino 2021). His research focuses on international relations theory, security in East Asia, Japanese and Chinese foreign policy, and U.S. foreign policy in the Asia-Pacific region.
Professor
Francesca Biancani
She has been an associate professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna, since 2022. Previously, she was a researcher at the same Department between 2018 and 2021 and an adjunct professor of History and Institutions of Mediterranean Countries, History and Institutions of Islamic Countries, History and Institutions of the Modern Middle East, Political Development in the Middle East, and Middle East International Relations between 2010 and 2017. In 2017-2018 she was a CNRs postdoctoral fellow at IFAO/CEDEJ, Cairo, Egypt. is a historian of the modern and contemporary Middle East specializing in the history of colonial and semi-colonial Egypt (1882-1952) with a special interest in topics of modernity, gender, sexuality, labor and migration.
Professor
Elena Irrera
Elena Irrera is Associate Professor in Philosophy of Politics at the University of Bologna. She received a PhD in Ancient Philosophy from the University of Durham in 2005. She was a fixed-term Lecturer in Ancient Philosophy and Ethics at the University of Warwick. In 2008 and 2009, she was an Honorary Research Fellow in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Durham. She was a member of the research group "Poetry and Philosophy in the light of Plato" at the University of Bergen (2008-2015). She is a member of the Instituto de Estudios Clásicos para la Sociedad y la Politica "Lucio Anneo Séneca," Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. She was unit manager for the FIRB project "Feeding Respect. Food policies and minority instances in multicultural societies" (2012-2015). She is the author of two monographs: The Beautiful as Metaphysical Causality in Aristotle (2011); On the Beauty of the Good Life: Ends and Criteria of Human Action in Aristotle (2012). She is currently working on the themes of respect, tolerance and solidarity from a historical-philosophical perspective.
Professor
Silvia Bagni
Associate professor in Comparative Public Law at the University of Bologna since December 2021.
Her first area of research was constitutional justice, through a comparative study of the Italian and Spanish systems. Currently, her interests focus on Latin American neo-constitutionalism, with particular reference to the Ecuadorian system, ecological constitutionalism, and instruments of direct democracy.
Professor
Marco Puleri
Marco Puleri is a lecturer in the departments of Political and Social Sciences and Cultural Heritage at the University of Bologna. His research interests mainly revolve around Russian and Ukrainian sociocultural dynamics and post-Soviet area nation-building processes. He authored the monograph Ukrainian, Russophone, (Other) Russian: Hybrid Identities and Narratives in Post-Soviet Culture and Politics (Peter Lang, 2020), and articles on the social and cultural history of Ukraine and Russia. From 2015 to 2017 he collaborated on a project of the Department of Political and Social Sciences, entitled Russia and China in the Global World. State and Society between Internal Dynamics and External Projections. From 2018 to 2020 he worked on a research project entitled Multiculturalism and Regionalisms in Post-Majdan Ukraine. Since September 2020, he has been a member of the steering committee of the three-year Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership GlocalEAST project (2020-2023). He was a member of the board of the Italian Association of Ukrainian Studies (2015-2021), and is currently a member of the editorial board of the journals Southeastern Europe and eSamizdat.
Professor
Carmelo Danisi
Senior Research Fellow and Assistant Professor of Public International Law at University of Bologna and Visiting Research Fellow at University of Sussex (UK). He was also Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University - College of Law (Endeavour Research Fellowship 2015) and post-doc fellow in PIL at Unibo (2012-2015). In 2022 he was awarded with the "Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale" to serve as Associate Professor in Italian Universities.
Among his publications, in 2015 he published his first book Human Rights Protection, Non-discrimination and sexual orientation (in Italian, Editoriale Scientifica) and in 2021 the ERC-funded monograph Queering Asylum in Europe (Springer, with the SOGICA team) as well as the edited collection Human Rights as a Horizontal Issue in EU External Policy (Editoriale Scientifica 2021, with M. Balboni).
He has been involved in several research projects concerning international and EU law: legal analyses for the EU Agency for fundamental rights, self-determination and Western Sahara, the intersection of IHRL with IRL with specific focus on migrant child and minority groups.
