What Do Venezuelans Have to Do to Make the Transition Work?

Alberto Ray is a Venezuelan consultant specializing in risk analysis, political risk, and security. He has written extensively on these topics in the context of Venezuela, including a recent series of essays published on Substack. He is also a member of María Corina Machado’s core advisory group.

Diego Bautista Urbaneja is a Venezuelan historian and political scientist whose work focuses on Venezuela’s political history and the role of oil in its development. He is the author of Venezuela y sus repúblicas, which offers a reinterpretation of the country's political evolution. A founding member of the School of Political Science at the Universidad Central de Venezuela and a member of Venezuela’s National Academy of History, Urbaneja has also served as a visiting professor at St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford. From 1991 to 1995, he was director of El Diario de Caracas.

Freddy Guevara is a Venezuelan opposition leader and former member of the National Assembly who emerged as a prominent figure in the country's student movement before entering national politics. Elected to the National Assembly in 2015, he served as its first vice president in 2017 and played a leading role in the nonviolent protests against Nicolás Maduro's government. His political activities led to persecution, nearly three years of refuge in the Chilean Embassy in Caracas, and subsequent imprisonment. He has lived in exile since 2021. Guevara is currently a Democracy Visiting Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School.

Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard.  He is Senior Fellow at the Kettering Foundation and a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions, with a focus on Latin America.   He is co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times Best-Seller and was published in 30 languages, and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point.    He has written or edited 11 other books, including Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2003), Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (with Lucan Way) (Princeton University Press, 2022).   He and Lucan Way are currently working on a book on democratic resilience across the world. 

Professor Levitsky has written for New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and The New Republic, and he has been a columnist for La Republica (Peru) and Folha de São Paulo (Brazil).

Venezuelan intellectual and former government official in his native country, has been fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and in the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, from where he coordinated the team seeking the liberation of Venezuelan judge María Lourdes Afiuni.

He has taught a variety of courses at Northeastern University, U.Mass-Lowell, Emerson College and more recently at Lesley University and in a doctorate at the Universidad del Valle de Cali, Colombia. His wide contacts with all parts of the Venezuelan democratic forces allowed him to bring a good number of them to participate in the Venezuelan Study Group.