Larry Diamond, a scholar at Stanford University and a leading expert on democracy in the world, will visit the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum on Thursday, March 4 to discuss, " Asian Values and the Future of Democracy in Asia." The public portion of the program begins at 6:45 p.m., with free seating on a first-come basis.
Diamond is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University, the primary center for research on major international issues and challenges, where he also directs the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.
He is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as senior consultant at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. During 2002-03, he served as a consultant to the U.S. 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 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. Since then, he has lectured and written extensively on U.S. policy in Iraq and the wider challenges of post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction, and was one of the advisors to the Iraq Study Group.
At Stanford, Diamond is also professor by courtesy of political science and sociology. He teaches courses on comparative democratic development and post-conflict democracy building. He has edited or co-edited some 36 books on democracy, including the recent titles, 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.
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 prospects for future democratic expansion.
Diamond's visit is made possible by a grant from the Freeman Foundation and is sponsored by the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at CMC.