Professor Aurel Croissant is Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at Heidelberg University. He is also a Ewha Frontier 10-10 Research Professor at Ewha Womans University and Visiting Professor at National Taiwan University. His research interests include democratic governance, civil-military relations, comparative authoritarianism, and Asian politics. His recent publications include Civil-Military Relations and Democracy in the Third Wave (Oxford UP, 2023); Democracy, State Capacity and the Governance of COVID-19 in Asia-Oceania (Routledge, 2023); Government and Politics in Southeast Asia (Springer, 2nd ed. 2022); Stateness and Democracy in East Asia (Cambridge UP, 2020); and Civil-Military Relations in Southeast Asia (Cambridge UP, 2018). He is currently finishing a monograph on Dictator’s Endgames for Oxford University Press, a Research Handbook of Autocratization (Routledge), and the Handbook of Civil Military Relations (Edward Elgar). He is editor-in-chief of the journal Democratization, regional coordinator for Asia-Oceania for the Bertelsmann Transformation-Index (BTI), and a member of the Academic Advisory Boards of the GIGA (Hamburg), and the SWP (Berlin). He is a research fellow at the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy and the Korea Foundation, and alumnus of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the East West Center (Honolulu).