CO-DIRECTOR

Silvia von Steinsdorff is Professor of Comparative Politics and the Political Systems of Eastern Europe at the Institute of Social Sciences at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin since 2009. She currently also serves as Vice Dean of Research at the Faculty of Culture, Education and Social Sciences. Her research covers the comparative analysis of political systems in the grey zone between democracy and autocracy as well as current tendencies of de-democratisation. The regional focus of her work lies on Central and Eastern Europe and Turkey. She is particularly interested in institutions at the intersection of politics and law.

CO-DIRECTOR

Ertuğ Tombuş is the co-director of the Center for Comparative Research on Democracy and Senior Research Associate at the Department of Social Sciences, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. Before joining HU-Berlin, he taught at Columbia University, The New School for Liberal Arts, Eugene Lang College, Western Connecticut State University, and the State University of New York. He has been the managing editor of Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory since 2009. He was a visiting research fellow at Northwestern University and Yale University. He holds a Ph.D. in political science. His primary teaching and research areas are theories of democracy, politics and law, theories of constitution-making, populism, and Turkish politics.

ACADEMIC COORDINATOR

Gülçin Balamir Coşkun is the senior research associate on the JuDem Project and the academic coordinator at the Center for Comparative Research on Democracy (CCRD). She previously held an Einstein Fellowship at the Department of Social Sciences at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2018–2021) and later worked as a senior research associate on the project “Judicial Autonomy Under Authoritarian Attack” (2021–2024). Her research focuses on authoritarianism, judicial independence, the rule of law, media capture, and local democracy. Her current work examines the role of lawyers in authoritarian states.

DOCTORAL RESEARCHER

Friederike Augustin is a doctoral research fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin since May 2021. Before joining the HU, she studied East European Studies, Comparative Social Research, and European Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, Higher School of Economics Moscow, and Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg. During her studies, she spent semesters abroad in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Russia. Moreover, she has worked as a student assistant at Institut für Europäische Politik (IEP) in Berlin. Her research areas are Central and Eastern Europe, Post-Soviet de facto states, democratization and autocratization processes, legal systems in authoritarian regimes, judicial independence, and socio-legal studies

DOCTORAL RESEARCHER

Leonie Teresa Bohle received a Master’s degree in Political Science from the University of Potsdam in July 2025 and joined the project as a research associate. During her studies, she completed internships focusing on the rule of law and corruption in Hungary and Bulgaria and spent three years working at the German Bundestag. Her research focuses on the relationship between formal and informal institutions in both democratic and autocratic regimes.

DOCTORAL RESEARCHER

Heleen Matton is a doctoral research fellow at the Institute for Social Sciences at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin since November 2025. Before joining the HU, she studied Political Science at Universität Leipzig and Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. During her studies, she spent semesters abroad at the University of Aberdeen and Universitatea Babeș-Bolyai in Cluj-Napoca. Her research interests include Central and Eastern Europe, the feminist critique of democracy, anti-genderism and autocratization.

STUDENT ASSISTANT

Aleksandra Czajka has been pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences at Humboldt University of Berlin since 2022 and has been working at the Chair of Comparative Politics and the Political Systems of Eastern Europe as a Student Assistant since December 2023.

STUDENT ASSISTANT

Marcel Fernengel is a Bachelor‘s student in Social Sciences at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He joined the Chair of Comparative Politics and the Political Systems of Eastern Europe as a student assistant in the summer of 2025. He is currently focusing his studies on quantitative research methods and statistics, analysis of social and economic inequalities, and the sociology of culture.

STUDENT ASSISTANT

Duygu Nural is a Master’s student in the German-Turkish Master’s Program in Social Sciences at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research focuses on identity, belonging, and the emotional dimensions of political participation, drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives from migration studies, political psychology, and social inequality. She also co-leads an interdisciplinary seminar on belonging and cinema within the Berlin University Alliance and has contributed to student-led academic and creative exhibitions.

İpek Bozkurt is a lawyer practicing in Turkey and focuses on violence against women and femicide cases and one of the legal advisors to We Will Stop Femicides Platform, a feminist non-governmental organization founded to protect women’s right to life and to prevent gender-based women homicides in Turkey. İpek has taken part in a documentary film, “Dying to Divorce”, directed by a British journalist Chloé Fairweather that portrays the surviving women who were subject to violence by their spouses for applying for divorce. The documentary has been screened at numerous human rights’ documentary festival and won prizes (including among others, Amnesty International Award at Thessaloniki Documentary Festival in 2021, United Kingdom’s entry at Oscars for Best International Feature).She has a Masters in Human Rights and received her Fellowship at Stanford University Law School, Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law for Draper Hills Program

Sergiu Buscaneanu is a research fellow at the Chair of Comparative Political Sciences and Political Systems of Eastern Europe, Institute of Social Sciences, HU Berlin. Prior to this, he held positions at Technische Universität Dresden, King’s College London, Uppsala University, the Hanse Institute for Advanced Study, and Universität Hamburg. His research spans two core programs. The first lies at the intersection of European Studies, International Relations (IR), and Comparative Politics and the second sits at the crossroads of IR and behavioral economics. He holds a PhD in Political Science from HU Berlin.

Tuba İnal Çekiç completed her undergraduate studies in urban planning at Istanbul Technical University in 1998 and received her PhD from the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Yıldız Technical University in 2009. In 2016, while serving as an associate professor at Yıldız Technical University, she was dismissed under a state of emergency decree. Since then, she has been based in Germany, working as a postdoctoral researcher at various universities. She is currently conducting postdoctoral research in the Department of Spatial and Urban Sociology at the Technical University of Darmstadt. Her work focuses on authoritarian urbanism, urban democracy, participatory governance, and the spatial agendas of migrants. She is currently pursuing a project examining how recent Turkish migrants in Berlin and Frankfurt are reshaping the city through the lens of Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space.  

Berkant Çağlar is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota. His ethnographic research focuses on Turkish courtrooms and the struggles of queer and trans defendants across a wide range of litigation, including the right to protest, hate crimes, association closures, and cases concerning public decency. His research aims to make legal advocacy more accessible, examine the motivations driving pro bono networks, and analyze how authoritarian governments mobilize judicial mechanisms to reinforce punitive governance.

Ali Yalçın Göymen holds a PhD in Political Science from Istanbul University. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Praksis Journal. From 2023 to 2025, he has been a research associate and a Fellow of Einstein Foundation Academic Freedom Programme at the Centre for Social Critique, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He is a research fellow at Potsdam University as a member of International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies (IRGAC). His research focuses on Marxist theory of alienation, politics of the commons, current authoritarian tide and theories of revolution in the 21st century.

Ece Göztepe is Professor for Turkish and Comparative Constitutional Law at the Bilkent University (Ankara/Turkey). Her main research interest and expertise are gender studies, Turkish and German public law, with emphasis on constitutional complaint remedy, state of emergency regimes, as well as the legal history of the Weimar Republic.

Markus Rau is a judge at the Higher Administrative Court Berlin-Brandenburg. Before joining the judiciary, he worked as a public law attorney at an international law firm and held research positions at the Max Planck Institute for International Law and other academic institutions. He has published widely in constitutional, administrative, European, and international law, and co-authored a leading commentary on Berlin’s construction law.

Claudia-Y. Matthes is Academic Director of the International Master's Programmes at the Department of Social Sciences and Senior Lecturer in Comparative Political Sciences and Political Systems of Eastern Europe since 2009. Since 2021, she also serves as HU's Academic Chair in the Democracy Hub within the Circle U. Alliance and has been leading the Jean Monnet Chair "Shaping the EU`s functionality and trust-internal reforms and policies for further enlargement (ShapingEU)" since 2023, funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union. Since 2016, she acts as the ISW's Erasmus Coordinator and teaches regularly at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara/Turkey and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, among others. Her research and teaching interests include European integration, comparative democracy studies, institutional and actor-centered approaches to political science, German domestic politics, politics of the past, and research design.