The Mershon Center for International Security Studies presents
"The Crisis of Liberal Democracy"
Larry Diamond
Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, 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 (and previously was co-director) at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. During 2002–3, 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. 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.
Abstract: For the past decade, the world has been in a modest but persistent recession of freedom and democracy. As more democracies in recent years have slipped back onto an authoritarian path--including Turkey, Thailand, Bangladesh, and Nicaragua--analysts have debated whether we might be a risk of a "reverse wave" of democratic breakdowns. But with the rise of right-wing, nativist, populist movements and candidates in Europe and the United States, a bigger concern has emerged: That liberal democracy (and perhaps democracy altogether) may be threatened in the core of the democratic system. This lecture will review the trends in freedom and democracy over the last decade and then explain why liberal democracy is now in danger in the one place where it was presumed to be stable: The West.
For more information and to register for this event, please visit the Mershon Center event page.
