Albena Azmanova is Professor of Political and Social Science. She has written extensively on populism, the rise of new ideologies, the crisis of democracy, rule of law and democratic transitions. In her latest book, Capitalism on Edge (Columbia University Press, 2020) she identifies ubiquitous precarity as the overarching social harm of our times. The book has received numerous awards, among which is the Michael Harrington Award, with which the American Political Science Association “recognizes an outstanding book that demonstrates how scholarship can be used in the struggle for a better world”.

Professor Azmanova has held academic positions at the New School for Social Research in New York, Sciences Po. Paris, Harvard University, the University of California Berkeley and the University of Kent’s Brussels School of International Studies.

Her writing is animated by her political activism. She participated in the dissident movements that brought down the communist regime in her native Bulgaria in 1987-1990. She has worked as a policy advisor for a number of international organisations, most recently, as a member of the Independent Commission for Sustainable Equality to the European Parliament and as consultant to the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (see Azmanova, A and B. Howard, Binding the Guardian: On the European Commission’s Failure to Safeguard the Rule of Law [2021])

Professor Azmanova is co-founder and co-Editor in Chief of Emancipations: a Journal of Critical Social Analysis 

She is Affiliate Member of the Bauman Institute (University of Leeds)

Here is the link to her personal website: https://www.azmanova.com/