Herman VOOGSGEERD holds degrees in public international and EU law and in contemporary history. His Ph.D. from 2000 was on European internal market law. He works as a senior lecturer in International Political Economy at the department of International Relations and International Organization (Faculty of Arts) and in the department of Business, European and Tax Law, both at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. His research interests focus on balancing social and economic rights in the European internal market, on EU trade policy and on the rise of Asia. His publications include ‘Building the Common Market but preventing chaos. The continuing relevance of the principle of territoriality of a Europe made by judges’, in M. Burgess, H. Vollaard (eds.), State Territoriality and European Integration Europe and the Nation State Series, (Routledge, 2006); ‘Trade Unions, Civil Society, Democracy and Authority in Japan’, in C. K. Lamont, J. van der Harst and F. Gaenssmantel (eds.), Non-Western Encounters with Democratization. Imagining Democracy after the Arab Spring (Ashgate, 2015); ‘International Labour Standards (ILS) as a Sine-Qua-Non of Bilateral and Multilateral Governance of International Trade’, in F. Gaenssmantel, C. Wu and F. Giumelli (eds.) Multilateralism at Peril. The Uneasy Triangle of EU, US and China (Routledge, 2023); and ‘“System friction” in China-EU economic relations and the reaction of the EU’, Asia-Europe Journal. Studies on Common Policy Challenges, (Springer, 2023).
Shigeru AKITA is Designated Professor of the Matrix Center, Institute of Laser Technologies, and Emeritus Professor (Graduate School of Humanities) of the University of Osaka, Japan. He has worked at the University of Osaka from 1985 to 2024, as Professor of Global History, Graduate School of Humanities, and as head of the Global History Division, Institute for Open and Transdisciplinary Research Initiatives (OTRI). He was President of the Asian Association of World Historians (AAWH) (2015-2022) and was awarded the Twentieth Ohira Memorial Prize in June 2004 from the Ohira Memorial Foundation, and the Fourteenth Yomiuri-Yoshino Sakuzo Prize in July 2013 from Yomiuri Newspaper and Chuo-Koron Shinsha. He received a Medal with Purple Ribbon from the government of Japan in November 2022. His major publications include History of the British Empire from Asian Perspectives (Singapore: Springer, 2025); (ed.) Oil Crises of the 1970s and the Transformation of International Order: Economy, Development, and Aid in Asia and Africa (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023); and (ed.) American Empire in Global History (London and New York: Routledge, 2022).