Professor Larry Diamond

Larry Diamond, MA, PhD

  • Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
  • William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
  • Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology
  • Former Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law

CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C147
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 724-6448 (voice)
(650) 723-1928 (fax)

Biography

Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford. He leads the Hoover Institution’s programs on China’s Global Sharp Power and on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region.  At FSI, he leads the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, based at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for more than six years.  He also co-leads with (Eileen Donahoe) the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He is the founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as senior consultant at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. His research focuses on democratic trends and conditions around the world and on policies and reforms to defend and advance democracy. His latest edited book (with Orville Schell), China's Influence and American Interests (Hoover Press, 2019), urges a posture of constructive vigilance toward China’s global projection of “sharp power,” which it sees as a rising threat to democratic norms and institutions. He offers a massive open online course (MOOC) on Comparative Democratic Development through the edX platform and is now writing a textbook to accompany it. 

Diamond’s book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad. A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016)The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999),  Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria(1989). He has also edited or coedited more than forty books on democratic development around the world, most recently, Dynamics of Democracy in Taiwan: The Ma Ying-jeou Years.

During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has also advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other governmental and nongovernmental agencies dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.

Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab WorldWill China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.

publications

Conference Memos
August 2021

POMEPS Studies 43: Digital Activism and Authoritarian Adaptation in the Middle East

Author(s)
cover link POMEPS Studies 43: Digital Activism and Authoritarian Adaptation in the Middle East
Journal Articles
January 2010

Why Are There No Arab Democracies?

Author(s)
cover link Why Are There No Arab Democracies?
Books
March 2005

World Religions and Democracy

Author(s)
cover link World Religions and Democracy

In The News

Hicham Alaoui
News

Hicham Alaoui Examines Pact-Making in Middle East

To mark the 20th anniversary of the establishment of CDDRL, the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy (ARD) at CDDRL hosted a talk featuring Hicham Alaoui, founder and director of the Hicham Alaoui Foundation, who discussed his latest book – Pacted Democracy in the Middle East: Tunisia and Egypt in Comparative Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
cover link Hicham Alaoui Examines Pact-Making in Middle East
Joel Beinin Nancy Okail Hesham Sallam Amr Hamzawy
News

Stanford Scholars Reflect on the Legacy of Egypt's January 25 Uprising

cover link Stanford Scholars Reflect on the Legacy of Egypt's January 25 Uprising
all panelists khashoggi final
News

Stanford Scholars Examine Khashoggi's Assassination and the Saudi Crackdown on Dissent

cover link Stanford Scholars Examine Khashoggi's Assassination and the Saudi Crackdown on Dissent