Larry Diamond
Senior Fellow

Expertise: Democracy in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; U.S. foreign policy affecting democracy abroad

Click here for more biographical and professional information

Click here for bio summary.

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy, and codirector of the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. He has also advised the U.S. Agency for International Development (whose 2002 report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest, he coauthored), the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other governmental and nongovernmental organizations. His book The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World (Times Books, 2008) explores the sources of global democratic progress and stress and the future prospects of democracy.

Diamond is professor by courtesy of political science and sociology at Stanford University, where he teaches courses on democratic development and coordinates the democracy program of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. In 2007, he was named Teacher of the Year by the Associated Students of Stanford University for teaching that “transcends political and ideological barriers.” That year he also received Stanford’s Dinkelspiel Award for “his inspired teaching and commitment to undergraduate education” and “for the example he sets as a scholar and public intellectual.”

During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. Since then, he has lectured and written on U.S. policy in Iraq and the wider challenges of postconflict reconstruction. He has also participated in policy working groups on Iraq and the Middle East, and, with Abbas Milani and Michael McFaul, he coordinates Hoover’s Iran Democracy Project.

Among his other published works are Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq (Times Books, 2005), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He recently edited the books Islam and Democracy in the Middle East (with Marc F. Plattner and Daniel Brumberg), Assessing the Quality of Democracy (with Leonardo Morlino), The State of India’s Democracy (with Marc Plattner and Sumit Ganguly), and Democracy in Developing Countries, with Juan Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset.