Boaventura de Sousa Santos is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Coimbra (Portugal) and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA). He has written extensively on globalization, sociology of law and the state, epistemology, and social movements. His most recent publication is The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South (2018).

José Manuel Mendes is an Associate Professor with Aggregation at the University of Coimbra. He is also researcher at the Centre for Social Studies, where he has been working in the fields of risk and social vulnerability, planning, public policies and citizenship. Her most recent work in English is ’Disaster Exceptionalism in India: The View from Below’, in William L. Waugh, Jr. e Ziqiang Han (eds.), Recovering from Catastrophic Disaster in Asia (2017).