William Ratliff
Research Fellow and Curator

Expertise: Latin America, China and U.S. foreign policy

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William Ratliff is a research fellow and curator of the Americas Collection at the Hoover Institution and a research fellow at the Independent Institute.

He has written extensively on how traditional cultures and institutions influence current conditions and on prospects for economic and political development in East/Southeast Asia and Latin America. Within these regions he has focused on China, Vietnam, Argentina, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba. He also writes on Chinese relations with Latin America and on U.S. policy toward the two regions. He travels in these regions four months of each year. Many of his writings have been published in Chinese and Spanish editions.

Ratliff’s studies include Doing It Wrong and Doing It Right: Education in Latin America and Asia (2003) and “The Confucian Foundations of Modern Vietnamese Development” (forthcoming). He has coauthored studies on legal reform in the developing world with Edgardo Buscaglia, on U.S. policy toward Latin America with Roger Fontaine, and on Juan Peron with Samuel Amaral. He is coauthor of The Civil War in Nicaragua (1993) with Roger Miranda and editor/coauthor of Inside the Cuban Interior Ministry (1994) with Juan Antonio Rodriguez Menier. He was an editor for the Yearbook on International Communist Affairs for two decades and for the Journal of Interamerican Studies.

Ratliff has interviewed dozens of top foreign leaders, published commentaries in all major American and many foreign newspapers, and consulted with top national and business leaders. On the Internet, he has written for the online NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and MSNBC’s "Opinion.” He has been interviewed on CNN, NPR, PBS, APR, BBC and Voice of America.

Ratliff’s B.A. (English/music) is from Oberlin College and his M.A. (Chinese history) and Ph.D (Chinese/Latin American histories), from the University of Washington. His has lectured in places ranging from nongovernmental organizationss to Stanford University, Tunghai University (Taiwan), the Austrian Defense Academy (Vienna), and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (Beijing). He has monitored elections around Latin America, lectured on tours on five continents, and testified before the U.S. Congress. He wrote classical music reviews for two decades for the Los Angeles Times and the Metropolitan Opera's Opera News.