Professor Larry Diamond – Political Science at Stanford University

Professional Summary

Larry Diamond is professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford University, where he teaches courses on democracy and American foreign policy, including a massive open online course on Comparative Democratic Development. He earned his B.A. in Political Organization and Behavior in 1974, M.A. from the Food Research Institute in 1978, and Ph.D. in Sociology in 1980, all from Stanford University. From 1980 to 1985, he taught Sociology at Vanderbilt University. Subsequently, he became William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). He directed FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law for more than six years and now leads its Program on Arab Reform and Democracy. Diamond served as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy from 1990 to 2022 and as senior consultant at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. He chairs the Hoover Institution Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region, co-leads the Project on the U.S., China, and the World, and is principal investigator of the Global Digital Policy Incubator at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center. During 2002–2003, he consulted for the US Agency for International Development and contributed to its report Foreign Aid in the National Interest. In early 2004, he served as senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.