Hind Arroub is a Visiting Scholar at CDDRL in the calendar year 2010, affiliated with the Program on Good Governance and Political Reform in the Arab World, and an associate researcher at the Laboratory of Sociology "Culture et Societe en Europe", affiliated with the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) and the University of Strasbourg in France.

She has a PhD in Law and Political Science from Mohammed V University of Juridical, Economic and Social Sciences in Rabat. Her work takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of international law, political and social sciences, human rights and media, and her research interests revolve around Morocco and the Arab World with a focus on: politics and religion, authoritarian regimes and democracy, riots and social movements, media freedom, human rights, and global politics' relationship to the Arab World (such as the Iraq war, international terrorism and the impact of globalization).

Hind was a lecturer in Hassan II University of Law in Casablanca where she taught "Constitutional Law and the Political". She has 10 years experience in journalism in Morocco and abroad, and is one of the founders of the Moroccan academic journal Wijhat Nadar (Point of view) and member of its editorial board and scientific committee. She is also a human rights activist. She has participated in, organized and managed a number of conferences, study days, colloquia, round tables, and workshops in Morocco and France.

Hind's first book "Revolutions in the Era of Humiliocracy'", co-authored with the Moroccan Professor of Futurism Mahdi El-Mandjra, addresses major questions of democracy in Morocco and the Arab world and other international issues related to the Middle East and North Africa region. 

She is also the author of "The ‘Makhzan' in Moroccan Political Culture" (2004) and "Approach to the Foundations of Legitimacy of the Moroccan Political System", published in November 2009.

Hind is also a poet, she has a poetry collection in Arabic called "Milad Nassim Assef" (Birth of a Stormy Breeze).

Sean Yom finished his Ph.D. at the Department of Government at Harvard University in June 2009, with a dissertation entitled "Iron Fists in Silk Gloves: Building Political Regimes in the Middle East." His primary research explores the origins and durability of authoritarian regimes in this region. His work contends that initial social conflicts driven by strategic Western interventions shaped the social coalitions constructed by autocratic incumbents to consolidate power in the mid-twentieth century--early choices that ultimately shaped the institutional carapaces and political fates of these governments. While at CDDRL, he will revise the dissertation in preparation for book publication, with a focus on expanding the theory to cover other post-colonial regions and states. His other research interests encompass contemporary political reforms in the Arab world, the historical architecture of Persian Gulf security, and US democracy promotion in the Middle East. Recent publications include articles in the Journal of Democracy, Middle East Report, Arab Studies Quarterly, and Arab Studies Journal.

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, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His 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 edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests (2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy (2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).

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 advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations 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 World; Will 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.

Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.