A former member of the Philippine House of Representatives and recipient of the Right Livelihood Award (aka the Alternative Nobel Prize) in 2003, Walden Bello was named in 2023 the Most Distinguished Defender of Human Rights by Amnesty International Philippines. He was co-founder and is currently co-chair of the board of the progressive research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South which is affiliated with the Chulalongkorn University Social Research Institute in Thailand. A retired professor of the University of the Philippines, he is currently an honorary research fellow at the State University of New York at Binghamton and is the author or co-author of 25 books, among them Paper Dragons: China and the Next Crash (Bloomsbury/Zed) and Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right (Fernwood).