Manuel Arias Maldonado (Málaga, 1974) is a tenured professor of Political Science at the University of Málaga, and has been a fellow at the University of Berkeley and at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, as well as a visiting researcher at the universities of Keele, Oxford and Siena.

His academic work revolves around the political and philosophical dimension of the environment, the theory of democracy, political liberalism, the socio-political effects of digitization and the affective turn in the social sciences.

He is the author of Dream and Lie of Environmentalism (2008), Wikipedia. A comparative study (2010), Real Green: Sustainability after the End of Nature (2012, Best Book of the Year Award from the Spanish Political Science Association) and Environment & Society: Socionatural Relations in the Anthropocene (2015), as well as from the entry "Nature" in the Encyclopedia of Political Thought by Wiley-Blackwell (2015).

He regularly collaborates in media such as El País, El Mundo, Revista de Libros, Letras Libres, Lettre International, Cuadernos Hispanoamericano and Revista de Occidente, and directs the Aula de Pensamiento Político at the La Térmica cultural center in Malaga.