Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, where he directs the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. He is the founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy and serves as senior consultant at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. During 2002–3, he served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development and was a contributing author of its report Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He advised and lectured to the World Bank, United Nations, State Department, and other agencies dealing with governance and development. His latest 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 postconflict democracy building. 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.”

In 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. Since then, he has lectured and written on US policy in Iraq and the wider challenges of postconflict reconstruction. He has participated in several working groups on the Middle East. With Abbas Milani, he coordinates the Hoover Institution Project on Democracy in Iran.

Diamond has edited or coedited 36 books on democracy including How People View Democracy, How East Asians View Democracy, Latin America's Struggle for Democracy, Political Change in China: Comparisons with Taiwan, and Assessing the Quality of Democracy. Other published works include Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989), and Democracy in Developing Countries, with Juan Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset.