Pluralism is, in the general sense, the acknowledgment of diversity. The concept is used, often in different ways, in a wide range of issues. In politics, pluralism is often considered by proponents of modern democracy to be in the interests of its citizens, and so political pluralism is one of its most important features.

The term pluralism is also used to denote a theoretical standpoint on state and power - which to varying degrees suggest that pluralism is an adequate model of how power is distributed in societies. For information on the political theory of pluralism see Pluralism (political theory).

In democratic politics, pluralism is a guiding principle which permits the peaceful coexistence of different interests, convictions and lifestyles. In this context it has normative connotations absent from its use to denote a theoretical standpoint. Unlike totalitarianism or particularism, pluralism acknowledges the diversity of interests and considers it imperative that members of society accommodate their differences by engaging in good-faith negotiation.

Shashi Tharoor (Malayalam: ശശി തരൂര്‍) (born 9 March 1956) is an Indian politician and a Member of Parliament (MP) from the Thiruvananthapuram constituency in Kerala. He previously served as the United Nations Under-Secretary General for Communications and Public Information^{[citation needed]} and as the Minister of State for the Ministry of External Affairs.

He is also an author and columnist.

Shashi Tharoor was born in London to Lily and Chandran Tharoor, both Malayalis, hailing from the state of Kerala^{[citation needed]}. Tharoor studied at Montfort School in Yercaud and Campion School in Mumbai^{[citation needed]}. He attended high school at St. Xavier’s Collegiate School in Kolkata and obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree in history from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi.

He went on to win a scholarship to study at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and earned three degrees in three years - a Ph.D. and two master's degrees at the age of 22, Tharoor is the youngest person in the history of the Fletcher School to be awarded a doctorate. His doctoral thesis, "Reasons of State", was a required reading in courses on Indian foreign-policy making. In 2000, Tharoor was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree^{[citation needed]} by the University of Puget Sound and in 2008 he received an honorary doctorate degree by the University of Bucharest^{[citation needed]}.

Usama Hasan is Quilliam’s Senior Researcher. He was a Founding Advisor for the organisation in 2008 and was a Senior Lecturer in Engineering at Middlesex University, 2003-2012. Usama has a PhD, MSc & MA in Physics and Artificial Intelligence from the Universities of Cambridge & London and is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. He is a certified transmitter of the Qur’an and Hadith and has translated a number of Islamic texts into English, including The Islamic Foundation’s “Way of the Prophet” (2009). He has argued that Islam is compatible with the theory of evolution, dismissing the story of Adam and Eve as "children's madrasa-level understanding" of human origins while pointing to the Islamic world's scientific achievements of the Middle Ages as evidence that Muslims should "move on as adults and intellectuals". He later retracted some of his statements about evolution Several Muslim leaders backed his right to free speech.

Usama was a member of the United Kingdom’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Projecting British Muslims delegations to Egypt in 2008 and to Afghanistan (Helmand) in 2010, was a Keynote Speaker at the Anglo-Syrian government-sponsored conference “The Message of Peace in Islam” in Damascus in 2009, and is a Patron of both the Forum for the Discussion of Israel & Palestine (FODIP) and Friends of the Palestinian-Israeli Bereaved Families Forum. Usama was also a Speaker and Steering Committee Member for the Google Ideas/Council on Foreign Relations Summit Against Violent Extremism (Dublin, 2011).

Chantal Mouffe (born 1943 in Charleroi, Belgium) is a Belgian political theorist.

Chantal Mouffe studied at Louvain, Paris and Essex and has worked in many universities throughout the world (in Europe, North America and Latin America). She has also held visiting positions at Harvard, Cornell, Princeton and the CNRS (Paris). During the 1989-1995 period she served as Programme Director at the College International de Philosophie in Paris. She currently holds a professorship at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster in the United Kingdom, where she directs the Centre for the Study of Democracy.

She is best known for her contribution to the development – jointly with Ernesto Laclau, with whom they co-authored Hegemony and Socialist Strategy - of the so-called Essex School of discourse analysis, a type of post-marxist political inquiry drawing on Gramsci, post-structuralism and theories of identity, and redefining Left politics in terms of radical democracy.

Victoria Chick (born 1936) is a Post Keynesian economist who is best known for her contributions to the understanding of Keynes's General Theory and to the establishment of Post Keynesian economics in the UK and elsewhere.

Victoria Chick graduated with a Bachelor's and Master's from the University of California at Berkeley, writing a thesis on Canada's experience in the 1950s with flexible exchange rates. As a research student she was taught by Hyman Minsky (among others), although her interest in Keynes and his General Theory developed much later. After further study at the London School of Economics, in 1963 she secured a post at University College London where she remained for the rest of her career, being appointed to a Chair in 1993. At UCL her interests shifted from international economics to monetary theory and macroeconomics. Her first major book, The Theory of Monetary Policy (1973), was a critical evaluation of both the Keynesian and monetarist approaches to macroeconomics that were dominant of the time. In 1971 she was present at Joan Robinson's Ely Lecture to the American Economic Association, titled The Second Crisis in Economics, and at the meeting called by Joan Robinson and Paul Davidson which gave conscious expression to what became the Post Keynesian school of thought.