Emanuela Ceva is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Geneva, where she directs the Research Centre for Corruption Studies. She has held fellowships at institutions worldwide, including the Center for Human Values, Princeton University; Nuffield College and Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford; Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo; University of St Andrews; Centre de Recherche en Éthique de l’Université de Montréal; University of Hamburg; Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University; Australian National University. She works primarily on public ethics and the normative theory of institutions with a focus on democracy, institutional trust, and the political role of emotions. Among her many publications is the book Political Corruption. The Internal Enemy of Public Institutions (Oxford University Press 2021, co-written with Maria Paola Ferretti).

As IDHEA Principal Investigator, her research aims to clarify how a dirty-hands heuristic can help to refine the diagnosis of institutional dysfunctions. By identifying which (ab)uses of power of office qualify as instances of dirty hands, her work will culminate in a typology of institutional dysfunctions that can help to make sense of standard and hard cases, e.g., by distinguishing cases of malicious corruption from those of noble cause corruption.

Michele Bocchiola is Senior Researcher and Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Geneva. He previously held research appointments at the University of Pavia, LUISS University in Rome, and the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where he also taught courses in ethics and political philosophy. His research lies at the intersection of political philosophy and public ethics, with a particular focus on questions of institutional trust, the ethics of anti-corruption, and the relationship between personal privacy and data ownership in contemporary democracies. He is the co-author, with Emanuela Ceva, of Is Whistleblowing a Duty? (Polity, 2018). His work has appeared in leading international journals, including the Journal of Political Philosophy, Ratio, the Harvard Review of Philosophy, and Analyse & Kritik.

Within the IDHEA project, Bocchiola’s work addresses the core question of which forms of trust are most appropriate to institutional life—“office trust” in well-functioning institutions and “dirty trust” in response to dysfunctions. He develops a philosophical model of officeholders’ duties—both personal and institutional—to clarify how moral burdens and responsibilities should be distributed when institutions fail structurally or circumstantially.

Marta Dainesi is a PhD candidate in Political Theory at the University of Geneva. She received an MA in Political Philosophy from the University of Pavia. She has taught Italian Language and Culture at the University IIT of Mumbai and in various educational contexts in France. Her main research interests include themes as recognition, toleration, respect, minority claims, the impact of cultural and linguistic contexts in the development of theories, and the political and ethical questions raised by emergencies. Her doctoral project, entitled “What is an Emergency?”, aims at providing a conceptual disambiguation of “emergency” and to examine the normative implications of this process of conceptual refinement.

Her role within the IDHEA project is to study what constitutes an emergency situation, by questioning the meaning and uses of this notion and identifying the factors that shape its characterization. The aim is to provide the conceptual background for analyzing both in ordinary and emergency circumstances the institutional actions and dysfunctions revealed by dirty hands phenomena.

Beatrice Bella is a PhD student in Political Theory at the University of Geneva. She received an MA in Politics, Philosophy and Public Affairs from the University of Milan and an MA in Public Policy from King’s College London. Beatrice has been awarded a Swiss Government Excellence Scholarships for Foreign Scholars and Artists for the 2024–2025 Academic Year. Previously, she worked as an ESG Analyst for a UK sustainability ratings company. Her main research interests include themes of dirty hands politics, officeholders abuse of power and the political role of emotions. Her doctoral project, entitled “A Normative Framework for Dirty Hands Politics”, consists mainly of an in-depth analysis of the dilemma of dirty hands and the emotional burden that doing wrong to do right places on officeholders.

Within the IDHEA project, Beatrice focuses on the emotional repercussions that violating moral prohibitions can have on officeholders. By studying the mixed emotional reactions accompanying Dirty Hands actions (e.g., guilt, shame, pride, regret, remorse), the aim is to understand officeholders’ moral burdens and the fitting emotional responses when officeholders break institutional rules to tackle institutional dysfunctions.

Francesco Chiesa works at the University of Geneva as Research Coordinator of the Research Center for Corruption Studies and of the SNSF Advanced Grant ‘‘ The Margins of Corruption’’ project. After obtaining an MA in Political Theory at the University of Pavia and a PhD in Political Philosophy at the University of South Wales, he held research, managerial, and teaching positions at the Universities of Pavia, Milano, Dundee, and Trento.

In addition to managing the grant and coordinating the project’s research activities with the PI, Francesco Chiesa will liaise between IDHEA, the Research Center for Corruption Studies and the SNSF Advanced Grant “The Margins of Corruption” project, ensuring fruitful exchanges and collaborations.