The instability of democracy, which used to be associated with developing countries, is now a global concern. Democratic principles and institutions are “backsliding” or under attack even in older, “established” democracies. In addition to trying to dismantle the institutional structure of democracy, elected authoritarian leaders and right-wing populist movements are employing discriminatory policies and rhetoric, targeting women, LGBT+ individuals, immigrants, and other marginalized groups. This seminar offers a comparative analysis of democratic decline during the Cold War and post-Cold War eras – periods characterized by class and identity politics, respectively. Noting the interconnection between human rights and democracy, it proposes a human rights theory of democracy that explains the decline of democratic systems by the gap between civil-political and social-economic rights. It highlights the pervasive influence of neo-classical and neoliberal economic paradigms as central factors driving this regression.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat studies human rights, with an emphasis on women’s rights, as well as processes of democratization, globalization, and development. She combines theoretical writings with empirical research – both qualitative and quantitative. Her publications include numerous journal articles and book chapters, as well as books: Democracy and Human Rights in Developing Countries (1991); Deconstructing Images of ‘The Turkish Woman’ (1998); Non-State Actors in the Human Rights Universe (2006); Human Rights Worldwide (2006); Human Rights in Turkey (2007, received Choice Award of Outstanding Academic Titles); The Uses and Misuses of Human Rights (2014). Her work in progress includes: human rights discourse and practices in Turkey since 1920s; women’s rights and neoliberalism; Intersectionality and Third World feminism; human rights norms; problems with tolerance as a human rights advocacy tool; the relationship between human rights scholars and NGOs; theorizing domestic politics of human rights. At UConn, she also contributes to the Human Rights program and the Women’s, Gender and Sexualities Studies.

She has served professional organizations in various capacities (e.g., Founding President, Human Rights Section of APSA, 2000-2001, and Chair, Human Rights Research Committee of IPSA, 2006-2012). Currently, she serves on the editorial boards of Human Rights Quarterly; International Feminist Journal of Politics, Journal of Human Rights, and Zeitschrift für Menschenrechte. She is also the editor of the book series “Power and Human Rights” by the Lynne Rienner Publishers. She is recognized by several awards, including the APSA Award of Distinguished Scholar in Human Rights (2010), SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities (2006), and the title of Juanita and Joseph Leff Distinguished Professor (Purchase College, 2006).

She has been engaged in human rights activism, as well, and is a founding member of the Women’s Platform for Equality (EŞİK) in Turkey.

Autocratic regimes often view emigration as a safety valve to reduce dissent, yet this strategy creates costly brain drain. Can autocracies draw politically motivated emigrants back with selective incentives, or is regime change the only viable option? We develop a three-dimensional model of return decisions, integrating conditions in host, home, and potential third countries. We argue that return is unlikely unless the home country restores core conditions—especially political freedoms—whose erosion triggered emigration, making selective incentives or return-promotion policies largely ineffective. Even when political change occurs, return remains limited among those who already enjoy political liberties abroad or can re-emigrate elsewhere. We test our theory using a conjoint experiment with 7,500 war-induced Russian emigrants across 100 countries, supplemented by open-ended feedback and longitudinal data. Democratization emerges as the minimum threshold for return, giving autocracies little leverage to reverse brain drain; where return occurs, it may ultimately strengthen opposition rather than incumbents.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Emil Kamalov has focused his research at the intersection of autocratic control, political behavior, migration, and repression, utilizing advanced quantitative methods complemented by qualitative data.

In his PhD thesis and papers, Emil develops an integrated account of extraterritorial opposition politics, examining how geopolitical tensions and host-country conditions shape emigrant activism, diaspora resilience, and migrant well-being. His findings demonstrate that under certain conditions, transnational repression by autocratic regimes can strengthen rather than weaken diaspora activism.

In collaboration with Ivetta Sergeeva, Emil co-founded and co-leads the OutRush project, the only ongoing multi-wave panel survey focusing on Russian political emigrants following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The OutRush project includes over 18,000 survey observations across four waves, covering respondents from more than 100 countries. The project has garnered substantial international media coverage and has drawn attention from policymakers and experts. Emil received his PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute.

This seminar will introduce the prototype of an innovative new AI-powered decision-making intelligence platform that forecasts country trajectories with scenario analysis, predictive analytics, hotspot detection, causal explanations through large language models, etc., for a range of outcomes central to CDDRL and FSI's missions — effective governance, human security, and sustainable development. The initial use case is for political resilience and its inverse, fragility, conflict, and violence.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Sanjeev Khagram is a world-renowned leader, entrepreneur, scholar, and professor across the academic, private, public, and civic sectors. His specialities include global leadership and management across sectors, entrepreneurship and innovation, the data revolution and 4th Industrial Revolution — including AI, sustainable development and human security, good governance and accountability, globalization and transnationalism, public-private partnerships and multi-stakeholder networks. Dr. Khagram holds all of his transdisciplinary bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from Stanford University. He has lived and worked for extended periods in Australia, Brazil, China, Kenya, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, the GCC, Germany, South Africa, Thailand, and the United Kingdom.

Dr. Sanjeev Khagram is currently a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and Department of Management Science and Engineering.  He is also a Distinguished Visiting Fellow with the Hoover Institution's Emerging Markets Working Group, where he leads the Global Reslience Intelligence Platform Partnership (GRIPP), and at the Center for Sustainable Development and Global Competitiveness, where he leads the AI and Sustainability Initiative at Stanford.

Khagram was most recently CEO, Director-General, and Dean of the Thunderbird School of Global Management, 2018-2024, which he took to #1 in International Trade with QS World University Rankings. He is on leave from his position as Foundation Professor of Global Leadership and Global Futures at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, Arizona State University.  Previously, he was the inaugural Young Professor of Global Political Economy at Occidental College, Wyss Scholar at the Harvard Business School, Founding Director of the Lindenberg Center for International Development, Professor at the University of Washington, and Associate Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Dr. Khagram is an award-winning scholar and teacher. Dr. Khagram has published widely including the award winning book Dams and Development with Cornell University Press; Restructuring World Politics with University of Minnesota Press; The Transnational Studies Reader with Routledge Press; Open Budgets: The Political Economy of Transparency, Participation and Accountability with Brookings Press; "Inequality and Corruption" in the American Journal of Sociology; "Future Architectures of Global Governance" in Global Governance, "Environment and Security" in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, “Towards a Platinum Standard for Evidence-Based Assessment,” in Public Administration Review, “Social Balance Sheets” in Harvard Business Review, “Evidence for Development Effectiveness” in the Journal of Development Effectiveness, and “From Human Security and the Environment to Sustainable Security and Development,” in the Journal of Human Development.

Dr. Khagram has worked extensively in global leadership roles across international organizations, government, business, and civil society from the local to the international levels around the world. Dr. Khagram has established and led a range of global multi-stakeholder initiatives over the last three decades, including the Global Carbon Removal Partnership, Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency, and the World Commission on Dams, authoring its widely acclaimed final report.  

Dr. Khagram was selected as a Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum, was a senior advisor to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Dean of the Desmond Tutu Peace Centre, and Founder/CEO of Innovations for Scaling Impact – a global technology enterprise solutions network. He is currently Chair of the Board of United Platform Solutions (an African AI-IOT Pollution Monitoring Venture) and Vice Chair of Altos Bank (the first new bank in Silicon Valley since 2008).

Dr. Khagram was born in Uganda as a fourth-generation East African Indian.  He and his family were expelled by Idi Amin and spent several years in refugee camps before being provided asylum in the United States in the 1970s.  He has lived and worked across all regions of the world and travelled to over 140 countries.

Two decades after the close of the Third Wave of democratization, scholars and practitioners alike continue to grapple with the question of why some democracies erode while others endure. To advance this critical inquiry, Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is launching the Democracy Action Lab (DAL), a new initiative devoted to rigorous, comparative, and conceptually grounded research on the conditions of democratic backsliding and resilience. DAL will provide an academic home for refining definitions, testing theories, and generating knowledge that informs both scholarly debates and practical responses to the challenges facing democracy worldwide.

The launch will feature a roundtable, “Global Challenges & Responses to Democratic Erosion” with leading voices in the field — Kathryn Stoner, Beatriz Magaloni, Anna Grzymala-Busse, and Didi Kuo — moderated by María Ignacia Curiel. Panelists will reflect on conceptual clarity and contestation around “backsliding,” its relationship to fragile statehood, populism, and authoritarian resilience, and the mechanisms through which institutions weaken or recover. Drawing on comparative cases across Latin America, Europe, and beyond, the discussion will also chart new directions for research: refining metrics, mapping mechanisms of erosion, and theorizing pathways of democratic renewal. The event marks DAL’s commitment to placing cutting-edge academic work at the center of global conversations about democracy’s future.

Following the panel, attendees are invited to a celebratory reception.

SPEAKERS:

• Anna Grzymala-Busse
• Didi Kuo
• Beatriz Magaloni
• Kathryn Stoner
   

MODERATOR: María Ignacia Curiel

Professor Mary Elise Sarotte, award-winning historian and author of Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, will offer reflections on the difficult task of writing history that is still unfolding. Covering the pivotal years from 1989 to 2022, her work traces how early decisions at the end of the Cold War shaped the trajectory of U.S.–Russia relations and contributed to the impasse that continues to trouble the international order today. In this conversation, Sarotte will explore the historian’s challenge of disentangling myth from evidence, of balancing archival distance with contemporary resonance, and of reckoning with a legacy that remains deeply contested and urgently relevant.

The event will begin with opening remarks from Kathryn Stoner, Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). The event will conclude with an audience Q&A.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

This seminar will present research featured in Killian Clarke's recently published book, Return of Tyranny: Why Counterrevolutions Emerge and Succeed. Why do some revolutions fail and succumb to counterrevolutions, whereas others go on to establish durable rule? This talk answers these questions, marshalling original data on counterrevolutions worldwide since 1900 and new evidence from the reversal of Egypt's 2011 revolution. It will lay out the book's movement-centric argument, which emphasizes the strategies revolutionary leaders embrace both during their opposition campaigns and after they seize power. Movements that wage violent resistance and espouse radical ideologies establish regimes that are very difficult to overthrow. By contrast, democratic revolutions like Egypt's are more vulnerable, though the talk will also lay out a path by which they too can avoid counterrevolution. In an era of resurgent authoritarianism worldwide, this talk will shed light on one particularly violent form of reactionary politics.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Killian Clarke is an Assistant Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. His research focuses on protest, revolution, authoritarianism, and democratization, with a regional focus on the Middle East. He is the author of Return of Tyranny: Why Counterrevolutions Emerge and Succeed (Cambridge University Press), as well as peer-reviewed articles in the American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, and World Politics. He received his PhD in Politics from Princeton University.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to the William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.

When, how, and to what ends do opposition parties look beyond their borders for support? In authoritarian and hybrid regimes, oppositions face formidable obstacles to winning power and ensuring fair elections. International engagement can provide resources to help overcome these barriers, but it also carries risks, from repression to charges of “foreign interference.” In his book project, Samet develops the concept of opposition diplomacy: efforts by opposition politicians to encourage international pressure on regimes through lobbying, international networks, and diaspora allies. Drawing on cross-national data and interviews across Southeast Asia, Europe, and the United States, he shows that oppositions often turn abroad when domestic pathways are blocked, and that such strategies can shape foreign policy decisions like sanctions. Yet these dynamics frequently concentrate international pressure on the most entrenched regimes, unintentionally limiting prospects for reform. The project highlights both the global influence of opposition actors and the limits of democracy promotion.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Oren Samet is the Einstein-Moos Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. His research examines the international dimensions of authoritarian politics and democratization, with a focus on opposition politics and a regional emphasis on Southeast Asia. His work explores opposition competition in authoritarian elections, processes of autocratization, and the challenges of democracy promotion and governance aid. His academic research has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and Political Communication, and he has also written for Foreign Policy, Slate, and World Politics Review. Before academia, he was based in Bangkok, Thailand, as Research and Advocacy Director of ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights, working with politicians and civil society across Southeast Asia. He also served as a Junior Fellow in the Democracy and Rule of Law Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. He will join Rice University as an Assistant Professor of Political Science in 2026.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Room E-008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.