Niccolo Milanese is a philosopher and writer. He is a founding director of European Alternatives, a trailblazing and prize-winning organisation active for over 15 years across the European continent exploring and promoting democracy, equality and culture beyond the nation state. He was educated in philosophy Cambridge, Siena and Paris, and has held research fellowships in Oxford, Mexico City, Rio De Janeiro and Vienna. At the European University Institute he is one of the convenors of the Forum on Transnational Democracy, which brings together practitioners, politicians, civil servants and academics. As a leading civic educator, he is involved in developing a new critical, posthuman and planetary approach to citizenship education in hundreds of schools across Europe. He is currently a lead researcher in transnational research projects on how feminist movements are leading democratic innovation; in movement education and political imagination; and in the rights and agency of migrant workers. Together with Lorenzo Marsili he published Citizens of Nowhere: Saving Europe from Itself (2019 - Zed Books); and with Katarina Kolozova edited Illiberal Democracies in Europe: an authoritarian response to the crisis of liberalism (2022 - Washington State University Press). With Alberto Alemanno and Kalypso Nicolaidis he is currently drafting Citizen Power Europe to appear in 2024.

At the Berggruen Institute Europe, he will be working on how Europe could bring about a paradigm shift in what political power means, and on a nomadic, polyvocal approach to universalism.