In his recent book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, Professor Larry Diamond identifies four key elements of democracy: "choosing and replacing the government through free and fair elections; active citizen participation in politics and civic life; protection of the human rights of all citizens; and the rule of law, in which the regulations and procedures apply equally to all citizens." What are the prospects and problems for implementing these principles throughout the Middle East? Professor Diamond will discuss this and other questions with Dr. Abbas Milani, co-director of the Hoover Institution's Iran Democracy Project and director of Stanford's new Iranian Studies Program.
LARRY DIAMOND
A senior fellow at the Hoover Institution
and professor by courtesy of political science and sociology at
Stanford, Larry Diamond has served as coeditor of the widely respected Journal of Democracy
since its founding in 1990. From January to April 2004, he served as a
senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, an
experience recounted in his recent book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq.
A Stanford PhD, he has worked with a group of European and American
scholars to produce the "Transatlantic Strategy for Democracy and Human
Development in the Broader Middle East," published in 2004 by the
German Marshall Fund of the United States.
http://www.stanford.edu/~ldiamond/
ABBAS MILANI
A research fellow and co-director of the
Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution with an appointment in
Stanford’s Department of Political Science, Abbas Milani is the author
of Tales of Two Cities: A Persian Memoir (1996), Modernity and Its Foes in Iran (1998); and Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Modernity in Iran (2004). He received his BA in political science and economics from the
University of California at Berkeley in 1970, and his PhD in political
science from the University of Hawaii in 1974. He was a research fellow
at the Iranian Center for Social Research from 1977 to 1978 and an
assistant professor at the National University of Iran from 1975 to
1977.
http://www.stanford.edu/~amilani/
ERIK JENSEN (moderator)
Erik Jensen is lecturer at the Stanford Law
School and faculty member at the Center on Democracy, Development and
the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International
Studies. He has been a Fulbright scholar, a consultant to the World
Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and a representative of The Asia
Foundation, where he currently serves as a senior law advisor.