Democracy IRL

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How Mongolia Became a Democracy, with Elbegdorj Tsakhia Feb 20, 2024

Show notes

Elbegdorj Tsakhia was president of Mongolia from 2009-2017 and played a key role in the country's transition from Communism to democracy after 1989. In this episode, he talks to Francis Fukuyama about the current challenges to democratic institutions in Mongolia.
Former President of Mongolia Elbegdorj joined the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) in 2023 as Bernard and Susan Liautaud Visiting Fellow, after a career in public service to Mongolia as a Member of Parliament, Prime Minister, and President. Currently, Mr. Elbegdorj is continuing his work to improve public policy, governance, and democracy through the Elbegdorj Institute, a think tank he founded in 2008. Mr. Elbegdorj holds a Master of Public Administration from Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government (2002) and a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism from Land Forces Military Academy of Lviv of former USSR (1988).
While at Stanford, his focus included democracy, disarmament, and governance across Asia.

Democracy IRL is produced by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University.
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Year-End Review of Global Democracy with Larry Diamond Jan 05, 2024

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Larry Diamond once again joins Francis Fukuyama for a year-end review to discuss the state of global democracy as 2023 draws to a close. Diamond also recounts his Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture, the 20th iteration of the annual lecture series named in honor of the famed political scientist and sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for Democracy, the Munk School at the University of Toronto, and the Canadian Embassy.
Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also a professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford. His research focuses on democratic trends and conditions around the world and on policies and reforms to defend and advance democracy. His latest edited book (with Orville Schell), China's Influence and American Interests (Hoover Press, 2019), urges a posture of constructive vigilance toward China’s global projection of “sharp power,” which it sees as a rising threat to democratic norms and institutions. He offers a massive open online course (MOOC) on Comparative Democratic Development through the edX platform and is now writing a textbook to accompany it.
Diamond’s book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad. A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has also edited or coedited more than forty books on democratic development around the world, most recently, Dynamics of Democracy in Taiwan: The Ma Ying-jeou Years.

Homelands: A Conversation with Timothy Garton Ash Oct 09, 2023

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Historian and author Timothy Garton Ash joins Francis Fukuyama to talk about his new book, "Homelands: A Personal History of Europe," covering a period from 1945 to the present. Bookended by World War II and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ash discusses the efforts made by Europeans to contain the demons of the early 20th century and measures the degree of success they have had.
Timothy Garton Ash is the author of eleven books of political writing or ‘history of the present’ which have charted the transformation of Europe over the last half-century. He is Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He writes a column on international affairs in the Guardian, which is widely syndicated.
His latest book, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, was published in English in Spring 2023 and has appeared or will soon be appearing in at least nineteen other languages. For full details, visit his website.

China's Road to Ruin, with Michael Bennon Aug 22, 2023

Show notes

This episode of Democracy IRL is a companion piece to Michael Bennon and Francis Fukuyama's essay, "China's Road to Ruin," published in the September/October 2023 issue of Foreign Affairs.

Here, Bennon and Fukuyama discuss how bad Chinese Belt and Road projects are, leading to financial crises in developing countries, and how international financial institutions like the IMF and EBRD are being asked to bail out dodgy Chinese loans.
Michael Bennon is a Research Scholar at CDDRL for the Global Infrastructure Policy Research Initiative. Michael's research interests include infrastructure policy, project finance, public-private partnerships, and institutional design in the infrastructure sector. Michael also teaches Global Project Finance to graduate students at Stanford. Prior to Stanford, Michael served as a Captain in the US Army and US Army Corps of Engineers for five years, leading Engineer units, managing projects, and planning for infrastructure development in the United States, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Thailand.

How Generative AI Will Revolutionize Everything Aug 14, 2023

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Jerry Kaplan is a renowned Silicon Valley veteran, computer scientist, and serial entrepreneur who has previously authored two books on AI, with a new one on generative AI forthcoming from Oxford University Press. In this episode, he joins Francis Fukuyama to discuss why he has suddenly decided that GAI is a genuinely big deal and a technology that will fundamentally change the ways we work and live.
An artificial intelligence expert and innovator, Jerry Kaplan founded several Silicon Valley start-ups. He is the author of Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs to Know, Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, and Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure. Kaplan currently teaches at Stanford University.

Israeli Democracy at 75 Jul 21, 2023

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On its 75th anniversary since independence, Israel's democracy has been both resilient and troubled over issues of national identity. Joining Francis Fukuyama in this episode to discuss is Professor Amichai Magen, a professor at the Lauder School of Government at Reichman University in Israel, currently in residence at Stanford University as a visiting scholar at CDDRL and the inaugural Visiting Fellow in Israel Studies at FSI.
Amichai Magen is a Senior Lecturer (US Associate Professor), Head of the MA Program in Diplomacy & Conflict Studies, and Director of the Program on Democratic Resilience and Development (PDRD) at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy, Reichman University. His research and teaching interests address democracy, the rule of law, liberal orders, risk, and political violence.

Magen received the Yitzhak Rabin Fulbright Award (2003), served as a pre-doctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. In 2016 he was named Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy, an award that recognizes outstanding thought-leaders around the world. Between 2018 and 2022, he was Principal Investigator in two European Union Horizon 2020 research consortia, EU-LISTCO and RECONNECT. Amichai Magen served on the Executive Committee of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and is a Board Member of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations (ICFR) and the International Coalition for Democratic Renewal (ICDR). In 2023 he joined the Freeman Spogli Institute as its inaugural Visiting Fellow in Israel Studies.

The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State, with Anna Grzymala-Busse Jun 06, 2023

Show notes

Political scientist Anna Gryzmala-Busse's new book disputes the scholarly consensus that war drove European state formation. She located the beginning of the state much earlier in Medieval history, with respect to institutions like law, parliaments, bureaucracy, and the like. In this episode, she joins Francis Fukuyama to discuss her new book on the religious origins of the European state.
Anna Grzymała-Busse is a professor in the Department of Political Science, the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the director of The Europe Center. Her research interests include political parties, state development and transformation, informal political institutions, religion and politics, and post-communist politics.
In her first book, Redeeming the Communist Past, she examined the paradox of the communist successor parties in East Central Europe: incompetent as authoritarian rulers of the communist party-state, several then succeeded as democratic competitors after the collapse of these communist regimes in 1989.

Rebuilding Leviathan, her second book project, investigated the role of political parties and party competition in the reconstruction of the post-communist state. Unless checked by a robust competition, democratic governing parties simultaneously rebuilt the state and ensured their own survival by building in enormous discretion into new state institutions.
Anna's third book, Nations Under God, examines why some churches have been able to wield enormous policy influence. Others have failed to do so, even in very religious countries. Where religious and national identities have historically fused, churches gained great moral authority, and subsequently covert and direct access to state institutions. It was this institutional access, rather than either partisan coalitions or electoral mobilization, that allowed some churches to become so powerful.
Anna's most recent book, Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State argues that the medieval church was a fundamental force in European state formation.
Other areas of interest include informal institutions, the impact of European Union membership on politics in newer member countries, and the role of temporality and causal mechanisms in social science explanations.

Will China Attack Taiwan? Interview with Oriana Skylar Mastro May 25, 2023

Show notes

China has promised to reincorporate Taiwan, and the Chinese military, which has been growing very rapidly, is preparing for such a military contingency. Dr. Oriana Skylar Mastro, a Center Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, joins Francis Fukuyama to talk about what such an invasion might look like and what US and Japanese responses to this threat should be.
Oriana Skylar Mastro is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Courtesy Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, where her research focuses on Chinese military and security policy, Asia-Pacific security issues, war termination, and coercive diplomacy. She was previously an assistant professor of security studies at Georgetown University. She is also a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and continues to serve in the United States Air Force Reserve, for which she works as a strategic planner at INDOPACOM. For her contributions to U.S. strategy in Asia, she won the Individual Reservist of the Year Award in 2016. She has published widely, including in Foreign Affairs, International Security, International Studies Review, Journal of Strategic Studies, The Washington Quarterly, The National Interest, Survival, and Asian Security. Her book, The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime (Cornell University Press, 2019), won the 2020 American Political Science Association International Security Section Best Book by an Untenured Faculty Member. She holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. Her publications and other commentary can be found at www.orianaskylarmastro.com and on Twitter @osmastro.

Francis Fukuyama on Valuing the Deep State (2023 ASPA Donald C. Stone Lecture) Mar 24, 2023

Show notes

On March 21, 2023, Francis Fukuyama delivered the prestigious Donald C. Stone Lecture at the annual meeting of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA), the leading academic association focusing on the study of the public sector. This special episode is a recording of his talk, “Valuing the Deep State,” in which he defends the importance of having a nonpartisan, expert, professional civil service for democratic governance. Using examples from the COVID pandemic and recent Supreme Court cases, Fukuyama argues that there needs to be a balance between autonomous bureaucracies shielded from excessive political interference, and accountability to democratic publics.

How US and European Populisms Differ: A Conversation with Sheri Berman Mar 07, 2023

Show notes

Sheri Berman, author of Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day, is a professor of political science at Barnard College and a Visiting Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. In this episode, she joins Francis Fukuyama to explain why populism is more threatening to American democracy than it is in Europe, and why parties of the Left have been in long-term decline.
Sheri Berman is a professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her research interests include the development of democracy and dictatorship, European politics, populism and fascism, and the history of the left. Her latest book is Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day. In addition to her scholarly work, she has published in a wide variety of non-scholarly publications, including The New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, VOX, The Guardian, and Dissent. She is on the boards of The Journal of Democracy, Political Science Quarterly, Dissent, and Persuasion.

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