A Quarter-Century of Promoting Democracy

Larry Diamond is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy.

Thomas Carothers is the Harvey V. Fineberg Chair and director of the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His most recent book is Democracies Divided: The Global Challenge of Political Polarization (2019, coedited with Andrew O’Donohue).

Jean Bethke Elshtain, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School and Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Chair in the Foundations of American Freedom at Georgetown University, delivered the 2008 Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture on Democracy in the World (see box on p. 6). Her most recent book is Sovereignty: God, State, and Self (2008).

Anwar Ibrahim, a member of the Parliament of Malaysia, heads the People’s Justice Party and the ruling Pakatan Harapan coalition. A former finance minister and deputy prime minister, he led the Reformasi opposition movement in 1998 and later spent ten years in incarceration as a political prisoner. After his party won the May 2018 election, he received a full pardon for all the crimes alleged against him. He has been a visiting professor at Georgetown University and SAIS in Washington and at St. Antony’s College, Oxford.

Zainab Hawa Bangura is head of the Civil Affairs Section of the United Nations Mission in Liberia. A native of Sierra Leone, she is a civil society campaigner; election-observation specialist; and human rights, anticorruption, and prodemocracy activist. She has received numerous awards for her work.