Drawing on his New York Times–bestselling book, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare, and his cover essay in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, “How to Fight an Economic War,” Edward Fishman will discuss how globalization gave rise to an age of economic warfare. As governments increasingly weaponize finance, technology, energy, and supply chains, the world is in the midst of what Fishman calls an "economic arms race” and a "scramble for economic security." From sanctions on Russia and Iran to the U.S.-China struggle over semiconductors and rare earths to the shock waves caused by the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, the session will examine how economic warfare is reshaping global power and the international order.

Colombians will vote for a new president on May 31, 2026, with a runoff scheduled for June 21 if no candidate secures more than 50 percent of the vote. These elections take place at a critical juncture for the country’s security strategy, institutional trajectory, and democratic resilience. While concerns about violence and public security remain central to voter decision-making, the electoral debate also encompasses broader, equally critical issues, including economic development, poverty reduction, institutional strength, victims' rights, and the stability and effectiveness of the presidency.

Democracy at the Ballot Box: The 2026 Electoral Cycle in Latin America is a new series, hosted by The Democracy Action Lab (DAL) at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and DAL's Academic Consortium. This panel will examine the stakes of the 2026 election and the alternatives before voters. It will analyze the main dynamics shaping the electoral cycle, including the leading candidates, the coalitions and groups competing for power, and the broader political context in which the contest is unfolding. The discussion will also assess the likely implications of competing policy agendas, evaluate the principal risks facing the electoral process, identify the sources of democratic resilience that may help sustain it, and draw lessons for other Latin American countries confronting similar challenges.

SPEAKERS

• María Ignacia Curiel - Research Scholar & Research Manager, Democracy Action Lab (DAL)
• Oliver Kaplan - CDDRL Visiting Scholar & Associate Professor, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver
• Javier Mejía - Lecturer, Stanford University's Department of Political Science, Stanford Civics Initiative, and Affiliated Faculty of Stanford's Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS)  & Stanford's Center for Poverty and Inequality
• Michael Weintraub - Associate Professor, Department of Political Science and Global Studies at Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia),  Director of the Center for the Study of Security and Drugs (CESED) in the Department of Economics, Member of The Democracy Action Lab's Academic Consortium

MODERATOR

Alberto Díaz-Cayeros — Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science, and Co-Director of DAL

Named a Best History Book of the Year by The Times (London), The Dark Side of the Earth offers a provocative rethinking of the end of the Cold War. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with key political actors — including Mikhail Gorbachev and leaders of post-Soviet states — Mikhail Zygar argues that the collapse of the Soviet Union was not a definitive victory for liberal democracy, but an incomplete and fragile transformation.

Blending political analysis with personal narratives, the book traces how moments of resistance — from figures such as Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn — shaped the late Soviet period, even as underlying structures of power endured. Zygar contends that the perceived “end” of the Cold War set the stage for the resurgence of authoritarianism, culminating in contemporary Russia’s expansionist ambitions and its confrontation with the West.

The talk reframes the post-1991 world, inviting audiences to reconsider the Cold War not as a concluded conflict, but as an unfinished historical process.

In Private Power and Democracy's Decline, a compelling, urgently important book, author Mordecai Kurz offers both a bold explanation of our democratic crisis and a major contribution to economic and political theory. The “second Gilded Age” of the last four decades has exposed democracy’s core contradiction. Democracy needs capitalism, but the unfettered, “free market” form of it generates extreme inequality and social and political polarization, which tear democracy apart. Moreover, the intrinsic tendency of unregulated capitalism toward monopoly power and wealth concentration has been turbocharged by the information and AI revolutions and globalization, which have been displacing workers, stagnating wages, and generating staggering new levels of private power. Public policy must contain monopoly power, reduce inequality, and broadly improve job prospects, skills, and economic security, or the surging system of “techno-winner-takes-all” will bring down democracy.

Democracy and security coexist uneasily. Security asserts priority over democracy during emergencies, when democratic processes seem luxuries. Yet deference paid to security can sow the seeds of democracy’s destruction. This prospect is magnified now, as both popular and elite usages of security in the United States have reached their highest levels in history. A short list of recent threats to national security alleged by our leaders includes unions of government workers, wind turbines, Chinese automobiles, Chinese garlic, America’s lack of sovereignty over Greenland, and America’s declining birth rate.

Why is security discourse so pervasive now, and what does this mean for democracy? This talk addresses these questions through examining security's history, focusing on three problematic features — ambiguity, immeasurability, and amorality — and their implications for contemporary democracy.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Stephen Stedman is a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), Professor by Courtesy of Political Science, and Director of Stanford's Program in International Relations. He joined Stanford in 1997, initially at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, before moving to the Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law (CDDRL) in 2010. Previously, he taught at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and Washington University in St. Louis.

Professor Stedman has led three major global commissions examining critical aspects of international security and democracy. From 2003-2004, he served as Research Director for the UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, and in 2005 as Assistant Secretary-General and Special Advisor to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. This work produced the landmark report A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility (2004) and led to significant institutional innovations, including the UN peacebuilding architecture (commission, support office, and fund), the mediation support office, a comprehensive counterterrorism strategy, adoption of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, and streamlined decision-making processes for the Secretary General. From 2010 to 2012, he directed the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, which published Deepening Democracy: A Strategy for Improving the Integrity of Elections Worldwide (2012). From 2018 to 2020, he served as Secretary General of the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age, which examined how social media and the internet affect democratic processes, resulting in Protecting Electoral Integrity in the Digital Age (2020).

Professor Stedman's research spans mediation, civil war termination, international institutions, American foreign policy, and democracy. His work has appeared in leading journals, including The Lancet, International Security, Foreign Affairs, Journal of Democracy, International Affairs, International Studies Review, and Boston Review. His co-authored book Power and Responsibility (Brookings, 2009) drew praise from Brent Scowcroft, who wrote that "the vision, ideas, and solutions the authors put forward…have the potential to redeem American foreign policy."

A dedicated teacher, Professor Stedman has directed the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL since 2015 and received Stanford's Dinkelspiel Award in 2018 for outstanding contributions to undergraduate education. 

Electoral autocracies have become one of the most prevalent forms of authoritarian rule. In these regimes, incumbents use state resources to shape electoral competition and bias outcomes in their favor. Existing research highlights media control, clientelism, and opposition harassment as central strategies. This paper identifies a distinct mechanism: the manipulation of electoral infrastructure as a tool of dispersed political engineering. We study this mechanism in Venezuela, an archetypal case of contemporary electoral autocracy, where the number of voting centers has nearly doubled over the last two decades. Using a novel panel dataset of geocoded polling centers covering 2000–2024, we examine the determinants of new center creation. We show that new voting centers are significantly more likely to be established in areas that previously exhibited stronger support for the incumbent. This relationship holds after accounting for population dynamics and spatial factors. The effect is particularly pronounced in urban areas and among centers that can be identified as politically motivated additions to the electoral infrastructure. We also find evidence that local pro-government organizations contribute to this process by generating bottom-up demand for new centers. These findings highlight how incumbents in electoral autocracies can manipulate the organization of elections to maintain political advantage.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Michael Albertus is a CDDRL Visiting Scholar and Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His research examines democracy and dictatorship, inequality and redistribution, property rights, and civil conflict. He has authored five books and over thirty peer-reviewed articles. His most recent book, Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies, published by Basic Books in 2025, examines how land became power, how it shapes power, and how who holds that power determines the fundamental social problems that societies grapple with. Albertus' work has also been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Development Economics, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and elsewhere. 

One of the hallmarks of successful democratization is programmatic party competition, whereby parties compete for office by offering distinct sets of policies to voters. However, there are signs across the advanced democracies of challenges, or alternatives, to policy competition. Elected officials rely on emotion, anti-system rhetoric, or identity to mobilize voters and make representative claims; further, affectively polarizated voters may care little about policy. This project develops a theory of programmatic decline, conceptualizing it as distinct from the typical programmatic-clientelistic dichotomy in comparative politics. It considers the limitations to programmatic competition, and bridges a gap between the study of party systems (focusing on what parties offer) and political behavior (focusing on how voters make choices). It develop potential indicators and measures of programmatic decline in the United States, with implications for the broader study of policy-based competition and democratic erosion. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, political parties, state-building, and the political economy of representation. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and was previously co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.