Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Oksenberg Conference Room
CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C147
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
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.
Crown Quad rm 329
Stanford, California 94305-8610
An expert in international law and legal institutions, Thomas C. Heller has focused his research on the rule of law, international climate control, global energy use, and the interaction of government and nongovernmental organizations in establishing legal structures in the developing world. He has created innovative courses on the role of law in transitional and developing economies, as well as the comparative study of law in developed economies. He co-directs the law school’s Rule of Law Program, as well as the Stanford Program in International Law. Professor Heller has been a visiting professor at the European University Institute, Catholic University of Louvain, and Hong Kong University, and has served as the deputy director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, where he is now a senior fellow.
Professor Heller is also a senior fellow (by courtesy) at the Woods Institute for the Environment. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1979, he was a professor of law at the University of Wisconsin Law School and an attorney-advisor to the governments of Chile and Colombia.
CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Stephen Krasner is the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations. A former director of CDDRL, Krasner is also an FSI senior fellow, and a fellow of the Hoover Institution.
From February 2005 to April 2007 he served as the Director of Policy Planning at the US State Department. While at the State Department, Krasner was a driving force behind foreign assistance reform designed to more effectively target American foreign aid. He was also involved in activities related to the promotion of good governance and democratic institutions around the world.
At CDDRL, Krasner was the coordinator of the Program on Sovereignty. His work has dealt primarily with sovereignty, American foreign policy, and the political determinants of international economic relations. Before coming to Stanford in 1981 he taught at Harvard University and UCLA. At Stanford, he was chair of the political science department from 1984 to 1991, and he served as the editor of International Organization from 1986 to 1992.
He has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (1987-88) and at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2000-2001). In 2002 he served as director for governance and development at the National Security Council. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
His major publications include Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investment and American Foreign Policy (1978), Structural Conflict: The Third World Against Global Liberalism (1985), Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (1999), and How to Make Love to a Despot (2020). Publications he has edited include International Regimes (1983), Exploration and Contestation in the Study of World Politics (co-editor, 1999), Problematic Sovereignty: Contested Rules and Political Possibilities (2001), and Power, the State, and Sovereignty: Essays on International Relations (2009). He received a BA in history from Cornell University, an MA in international affairs from Columbia University and a PhD in political science from Harvard.
CDDRL
Encina Hall, C152
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Stephen Stedman is a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), an affiliated faculty member at CISAC, and professor of political science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He is director of CDDRL's Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, and will be faculty director of the Program on International Relations in the School of Humanities and Sciences effective Fall 2025.
In 2011-12 Professor Stedman served as the Director for the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, a body of eminent persons tasked with developing recommendations on promoting and protecting the integrity of elections and international electoral assistance. The Commission is a joint project of the Kofi Annan Foundation and International IDEA, an intergovernmental organization that works on international democracy and electoral assistance.
In 2003-04 Professor Stedman was Research Director of the United Nations High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change and was a principal drafter of the Panel’s report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility.
In 2005 he served as Assistant Secretary-General and Special Advisor to the Secretary- General of the United Nations, with responsibility for working with governments to adopt the Panel’s recommendations for strengthening collective security and for implementing changes within the United Nations Secretariat, including the creation of a Peacebuilding Support Office, a Counter Terrorism Task Force, and a Policy Committee to act as a cabinet to the Secretary-General.
His most recent book, with Bruce Jones and Carlos Pascual, is Power and Responsibility: Creating International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2009).
CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
James Fearon is the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and a professor of political science. He is a Senior Fellow at FSI, affiliated with CISAC and CDDRL. His research interests include civil and interstate war, ethnic conflict, the international spread of democracy and the evaluation of foreign aid projects promoting improved governance. Fearon was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002. Some of his current research projects include work on the costs of collective and interpersonal violence, democratization and conflict in Myanmar, nuclear weapons and U.S. foreign policy, and the long-run persistence of armed conflict.
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Amichai Magen is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the founding director of the center's Jan Koum Israel Studies Program. Previously, he served as the visiting fellow in Israel Studies at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, head of the MA Program in Diplomacy & Conflict Studies, and director of the Program on Democratic Resilience and Development (PDRD) at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy, Reichman University, Herzliya, Israel. His research and teaching interests address democracy, the rule of law, liberal orders, risk and political violence, as well as Israeli politics and policy.
Magen received the Yitzhak Rabin Fulbright Award (2003), served as a pre-doctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and was the W. Glenn Campbell National Fellow at the Hoover Institution (2008-9). In 2016, he was named a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy, an award that recognizes outstanding thought leaders around the world. Between 2018 and 2022, he served as principal investigator in two European Union Horizon 2020 research consortia, EU-LISTCO and RECONNECT. Amichai Magen served on the Executive Committee of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and is a Board Member of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations (ICFR) and the International Coalition for Democratic Renewal (ICDR).
In one and a half days of academic workshops, scholars from multiple disciplines and across the country and Europe discussed the issue of information incompleteness, and the role in this of the media, and possible media bias. Corporate performance and the media were also discussed.
Oksenberg Conference Room
Gay McDougall has been Executive Director of International Human Rights Law Group since 1994. IHRLG works on human rights programs and initiatives in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and the Americas. In 1999, Ms. McDougall was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (the "genius award") for her innovative work in the area of international human rights. She has served as an independent expert on the United Nations treaty body overseeing the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination, and served on the U.N. Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, where she was a Special Rapporteur on the issue of systemic rape, sexual slavery and slavery-like practices during armed conflict. Prior to joining IHRLG, Ms. McDougal was an international member of South Africa's Independent Electoral Commission. Lunch will be provided.
Oksenberg Conference Room
On 15-16 November 2002, the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law of the Institute for International Studies at Stanford University sponsored a workshop in Stanford, CA on "Regime Transitions from Communist Rule in Comparative Perspective." Over 40 individuals attended the workshop, including many notable American and international scholars. The six individual sessions of the workshop examined a variety of issues: the transitions model two decades later; whether transitions from communist rule are distinctive; theoretical perspectives seeking to explain the variation in outcome among post-communist regimes; and regional perspectives examining the variation in outcome in Central and Eastern Europe, the Slavic Region, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. The workshop also sought to determine whether there is a compelling intellectual rationale for a larger scale, multi-year project on transitions from communism or if the workshop itself represented the capstone event.
The workshop was organized by Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Michael McFaul, Hoover Institution and Political Science, and Gail Lapidus, Senior Fellow at the Institute for International Studies. Workshop participants included scholars at many of the leading political science and government departments in the United States, as well as scholars associated with international academic institutions, governments, and development organizations. This report summarizes the presentations given as part of the workshop, and the discussion that followed. Every effort has been made to portray accurately the range of opinions expressed; however, space and organizational considerations resulted in omissions and paraphrasing. Kathryn Ducceschi, who served as a rapporteur during the meeting with John Cieslewicz, authored this document, and the workshop organizers served as editors.
Any errors in fact or interpretation should be attributed to the author and the editors.
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
From the wild swings of the stock market to the online auctions of eBay to the unexpected twists of the world's post-Communist economies, markets have suddenly become quite visible. We now have occasion to ask, "What makes these institutions work? How important are they? How can we improve them?"
Taking us on a lively tour of a world we once took for granted, John McMillan offers examples ranging from a camel trading fair in India to the $20 million per day Aalsmeer flower market in the Netherlands to the global trade in AIDS drugs. Eschewing ideology, he shows us that markets are neither magical nor immoral. Rather, they are powerful if imperfect tools, the best we've found for improving our living standards. A New York Times Notable Book. W. W. Norton & Company
Leading democracy scholars from all over the world held a two-day workshop October 10-11 on "The Quality of Democracy: Improvement or Subversion?" organized by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). The topics of discussion included "Accountability and Responsiveness" and "Freedom and Equality," and comparative case studies between Eastern and Western Europe, Latin America and Asia, and South Asia and Africa.
Lead organizers of the workshop were Larry Diamond, coordinator of CDDRL's program on democracy and Leonardo Morlino, European University Institute, Florence. Participants included, Guillermo O'Donnell, Notre Dame; Philippe Schmitter, European University Institute, Florence; Marc Plattner, National Endowment for Democracy; Robert Mattes, University of Cape Town; E. Gyimah Boadi, University of Ghana; and Michael A. McFaul and Terry L. Karl.
