Dinsha Mistree is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he manages the Program on Strengthening US-Indian Relations. He is also a research fellow in the Rule of Law Program at Stanford Law School and an affiliated scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. Dr. Mistree studies the relationship between governance and economic growth in developing countries. His scholarship concentrates on the political economy of legal systems, public administration, and education policy, with a regional focus on India. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Politics from Princeton University, with an S.M. and an S.B. from MIT. He previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at CDDRL and was a visiting scholar at IIM-Ahmedabad.

Erik Jensen holds joint appointments at Stanford Law School and Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. He is Lecturer in Law, Director of the Rule of Law Program at Stanford Law School, an Affiliated Core Faculty at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and Senior Advisor for Governance and Law at The Asia Foundation. Jensen began his international career as a Fulbright Scholar. He has taught and practiced in the field of law and development for 35 years and has carried out fieldwork in approximately 40 developing countries. He lived in Asia for 14 years. He has led or advised research teams on governance and the rule of law at the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the African Development Bank. Among his numerous publications, Jensen co-edited with Thomas Heller Beyond Common Knowledge: Empirical Approaches to the Rule of Law (Stanford University Press: 2003).

At Stanford, he teaches courses related to state building, development, global poverty and the rule of law. Jensen’s scholarship and fieldwork focuses on bridging theory and practice, and examines connections between law, economy, politics and society. Much of his teaching focuses on experiential learning. In recent years, he has committed considerable effort as faculty director to three student driven projects: the Afghanistan Legal Education Project (ALEP) which started and has developed a law degree-granting programs at the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF), an institution where he also sits on the Board of Trustees; the Iraq Legal Education Initiative at the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani (AUIS); and the Rwanda Law and Development Project at the University of Rwanda. He has also directed projects in Bhutan, Cambodia and Timor Leste. With Paul Brest, he is co-leading the Rule of Non-Law Project, a research project launched in 2015 and funded by the Global Development and Poverty Fund at the Stanford King Center on Global Development. The project examines the use of various work-arounds to the formal legal system by economic actors in developing countries. Eight law faculty members as well as scholars at the Freeman Spogli Institute are participating in the Rule of Non-Law Project.

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.

Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His book In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir will be published in fall 2026.

Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004. He is editor-in-chief of American Purpose, an online journal.

Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), the Pardee Rand Graduate School, and Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland). He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, and the Board of the Volcker Alliance. He is a fellow of the National Academy for Public Administration, a member of the American Political Science Association, and of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.

(October 2025)

Tesalia Rizzo holds a Ph.D. in Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her research focuses on the demand and supply side of political mediation. Specifically, on how political (formal, informal or clientelist) intermediaries shape citizens’ attitudes and political engagement. She also works with non-governmental practitioners in Mexico to develop and test policies that disincentivize citizen reliance on clientelist and corrupt avenues of engaging with government and strengthen citizen demand for accountability. Her work with Mexican practitioners was awarded the 2017 Innovation in Transparency Award given by the Mexican National Institute for Access to Information (INAI). She is also a Research Fellow at MIT GOV/LAB and the Political Methodology Lab, at MIT. She is a graduate of the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) in Mexico City. Prior to arriving at Stanford, she was a pre-doctoral fellow at the Center for US-Mexican Studies at University of California, San Diego and will join the Political Science Faculty at the University of California, Merced in 2020.

​I am a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Starting in 2023, I will be an Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School's Business, Government and the International Economy (BGIE) unit.

My research examines political extremism, destigmatization, and radicalization, focusing on the role of popularity cues in online media. My related research examines a broad range of threats to democratic governance, including authoritarian encroachment, ethnic prejudice in public goods allocation, and misinformation. 

​My dissertation won APSA's Ernst B. Haas Award for the best dissertation on European Politics. I am currently working on my book project, Engineering Extremism, with generous funding from the William F. Milton Fund at Harvard.

My published work has appeared in the American Political Science Review,  Governance,  International Studies Quarterly, Public Administration Review, and the Virginia Journal of International Law, along with an edited volume in Democratization (Oxford University Press). My research has been featured in KQED/NPR, The Washington Post, and VICE News.
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I received my Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley in 2020. I was a Predoctoral Research Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University and the Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet. I hold a B.A. (Magna Cum Laude; Phi Beta Kappa) from Cornell University and an M.A. (with Distinction) from the University of California, Berkeley.