Empowered democracy is an alternative form of social-democratic arrangements developed by philosopher and politician Roberto Mangabeira Unger. Theorized in response to the repressiveness and rigidity of contemporary liberal democratic society, the theory of empowered democracy envisions a more open and more plastic set of social institutions through which individuals and groups can interact, propose change, and effectively empower themselves to transform social, economic, and political structures. The key strategy is to combine freedom of commerce and governance at the local level with the ability of political parties at the central level to promote radical social experiments that would bring about decisive change in social and political institutions.

The theory of empowered democracy has received widespread critical acclaim. It has been hailed as the only such constructive vision of society in critical legal studies, and the term has since seeped into the mainstream media, even if the theory has not. Meanwhile, Cornel West, Perry Anderson, Richard Rorty, and numerous other prominent scholars have published detailed—and, very often, admiring—essays on Unger's project.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (b. March 24, 1947, Rio de Janeiro) is a philosopher and Brazilian politician. He is the author of nearly two dozen books in social, political, legal, and economic theory, and philosophy. His work has sought to understand and change the structure of contemporary societies in ways that do not vindicate their necessity, but on the contrary inform the imagination of alternatives. His work in legal theory helped disrupt the methodological consensus in legal thought and transform contemporary legal theory. His writings in philosophy have been critically hailed as successfully grappling with some of the most fundamental and enduring problems of human existence, and have been put into direct dialogue with Kant and Hume. His work in social, political, and economic theory have been widely praised, and even compared to Dante and Milton. This intellectual activity serves as the basis for Unger's direct political engagement in Brazil and Latin America.

Unger has taught at the Harvard Law School for all of his adult life. He became the youngest tenured faculty at the law school in 1976, and has since instructed many of the world elite, including Barack Obama, who took Jurisprudence and Reinventing Democracy with Unger. He offers classes only in the spring semester on subjects covering everything from the history of religious thought to programmatic solutions to the present day economic crisis.

Bassam Tibi (Arabic: بسام طيبي‎), born 1944 in Damascus, lives in Germany since 1962 and, since 1976, he is a German citizen. He is a political scientist and Professor of International Relations. In academia, he is known for his analysis of international relations and the introduction of Islam to the study of international conflict and of civilization. Tibi is perhaps best known for introducing the controversial concept of European Leitkultur as well as the concept of Euroislam for the integration of Muslim immigrants in Europe. He is also the founder of Islamology as a social-scientific study of Islam and conflict in post-bipolar politics. Tibi has done research in Asian and African countries. He publishes in English, German and Arabic.

He studied in Frankfurt am Main, obtained his Ph.D. there in 1971 and habilitated in Hamburg, Germany. Between 1973 and 2009, until his retirement, he was Professor for International Relations at Göttingen University. Parallel to this appointment he was from 1982 to 2000 at Harvard University in a variety of affiliations, the latest from 1998 to 2000 as The Bosch Fellow of Harvard. Currently, he is an A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. Tibi had eighteen visiting professorships in all continents including fellowships in Princeton University, UC Berkeley, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and most recently (2010) at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Washington D.C. Tibi was visiting senior fellow at Yale University. Along his retirement in 2009, he published his major life-time book "Islam's Predicament with Cultural Modernity".