Anna Wójcik is a visiting fellow with the Engaging Central Europe program of The German Marshall Fund of the United States. She is an expert on democracy, the rule of law, and human rights, with a particular focus on Poland. She holds a PhD in law from the Polish Academy of Sciences and gained extensive experience in international research consortia. Her thesis analyzed the limitations to freedom of expression in the name of historical policy from the perspective of international human rights law. She is assistant professor at the Institute of Legal Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences (currently on leave). She was a Re:Constitution research fellow at the Democracy Institute of Central European University and a ReThink.CEE Fellow at The German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Anna is a co-founder of the rule-of-law monitoring projects The Wiktor Osiatyński Archive and Rule of Law in Poland. Prior to that she was assistant editor at Visegrád Insight. She also covers the rule-of-law backsliding in Poland for OKO.press, a public-interest journalism portal, comments on this issue for international media outlets, and provides expertise to think tanks and nongovernmental organizations.

Dorka Takácsy is a visiting fellow with the Engaging Central Europe program of The German Marshall Fund of the United States. She pursues her PhD studies at the Corvinus University of Budapest, researching Russian domestic disinformation about the West, and she is a research fellow at the Centre for Euro-Atlantic Integration and Democracy, focusing on disinformation. She was a Marcin Król Fellow at Visegrád Insight in 2022-2023 and a Széll Kálmán Public Policy Fellow of the Hungary Foundation in 2018.

Dorka holds an MA in international relations from Central European University and a BA in international business from the Budapest Business School and the University of Picardy Jules Verne. She also studied at the ICHEC Brussels Management School, at the Pushkin State Language Institute in Moscow, and George Mason University in the United States as well. She gained professional experience at, among others, the European Parliament, the Political Capital Institute in Budapest, and the National Defense University in Washington. She is fluent in Russian, English, German, French, and Italian besides her mother tongue Hungarian, and she is learning Croatian.

Asya Metodieva is a visiting fellow with the Engaging Central Europe program of The German Marshall Fund of the United States. She analyzes political developments in Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans. For GMF, she focuses on Bulgaria’s foreign and security policies, rule of law, and democratic security. Previously, she was a GMF ReThink.CEE Fellow. She earned her PhD from Central European University for her research on the radicalization and mobilization of radical and extremist movements. Her book on foreign Islamist fighters from the Balkans was published by Routledge in 2023.

Asya is currently involved in a project on digital sovereignty in Europe at the Institute of International Relations in Prague, where she is a researcher. She also teaches at Charles University in Prague. Previously she was a fellow with Visegrád Insight (2020) and LSE Ideas (2018), and she carried out a research visit at the University of Oxford. She wrote academic and policy publications and has cooperated with various think tanks and international organizations including the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the Radicalization Awareness Network, the Europeum Institute for European Policy, and the Atlantic Initiative. As part of her job, she organizes and participates in international conferences, and provides institutions and policymakers with analyses and recommendations.