On October 21 at 9 AM, the Pacific Council will host a webinar featuring Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University, and Jerrold D. Green, Interim President & CEO of the Pacific Council. A leading scholar of democracy and governance, Diamond will explore the resurgence of authoritarianism, democratic backsliding in established systems, and the erosion of trust in democratic institutions. 

This conversation will examine how disinformation, political polarization, and declining civic engagement are weakening democratic resilience at home, while assessing how autocratic powers are exploiting these vulnerabilities to expand their influence abroad. Drawing on his decades of research and expertise, Diamond will offer insights on what can be done to revitalize democratic values and institutions, strengthen civil society, and foster international cooperation among democracies. Guests will gain a deeper understanding of the key forces shaping the future of democracy and the urgent steps needed to safeguard it, and be able to engage directly with one of the foremost experts on democracy. 

Please send questions in advance to events@pacificcouncil.org.

To register for this webinar, visit the Zoom Registration Page

Guest Speaker

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. He also chairs the Hoover Institution Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and is the principal investigator of the Global Digital Policy Incubator, part of Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center. For more than six years, he directed FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, where he now leads its Program on Arab Reform and Democracy.

During 2017–18, he cochaired, with Orville Schell, a working group formed of researchers from Hoover and from the Asia Society Center on US-China Relations, culminating in the report China’s Influence and American Interests: Promoting Constructing Vigilance (published by the Hoover Institution Press in 2019). He is the founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as senior consultant at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy.

Diamond’s research focuses on democratic trends and conditions around the world and on policies and reforms to defend and advance democracy. His latest 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. Diamond is professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford University, where he teaches courses on democracy and American foreign policy. He is currently offering Comparative Democratic Development as a massive open online course (MOOC) on the edX platform.

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 also advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other governmental and nongovernmental agencies 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.

Diamond’s 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 also edited or coedited some fifty books on democratic development around the world. Among them are Democracy in Decline? (2016); Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World (2014); Will China Democratize? (2013); and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy (2012), all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran (2015), with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset he edited the four-volume series Democracy in Developing Countries (1988–89), which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development. Diamond writes a monthly column for the American Interest and frequently writes, speaks, and consults about how to defend and reform liberal democracy

He received all of his degrees from Stanford University, including a B.A. in 1974, an M.A. in 1978, and a Ph.D. in Sociology in 1980. He taught Sociology at Vanderbilt University from 1980-85.

Moderator

 

Dr. Jerrold D. Green is the Global Advisor to Cedars-Sinai Hospital, a Los Angeles-based healthcare organization, and a Senior Fellow at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations. He is also the Interim President and CEO of the Pacific Council on International Policy, a position he previously occupied for 16 years while serving as a Research Professor of Communication, Business, and International Relations at the University of Southern California. Green was a Partner at Best Associates in Dallas, Texas, a merchant banking firm with global operations. He also occupied senior management positions at the RAND Corporation, where he was awarded the RAND Medal for Excellence. Dr. Green has a B.A. (summa cum laude) from the University of Massachusetts/Boston, as well as an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. His academic career began at the University of Michigan, and he subsequently joined the University of Arizona, where he became a Professor of Political Science and Sociology as well as Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

Green has lived and worked in Egypt, where he was a Fulbright Fellow, Iran, and Israel. He has been a visiting fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Science's West Asian Studies Center in Beijing; a visiting lecturer at the Havana-based Center for African and Middle East Studies (CEAMO), a fellow at the Australian Defense College, and delivered papers at conferences sponsored by the Iranian Institute of International Affairs in Tehran. Dr. Green led three U.S. Department of Defense-sponsored fact-finding delegations to Afghanistan, one to Iraq, and has served as an observer at the legal proceedings at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, conducted by the U.S. Department of Defense.

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To register for this webinar, visit the Zoom Registration Page