August 17th, 2012

Fighting for reform in 22 countries, Stanford fellows get lessons in building democracy

Some of this year's Draper Hills Summer Fellows have been imprisoned and abused for trying to democratize their countries. Read more »

May 22nd, 2012

Fukuyama on the challenges of building a political movement after Tahrir

As the Egyptian public prepares to vote in the first post-revolutionary presidential elections this week, Francis Fukuyama takes stock of the political playing field in an article for The Daily Beast. With no genuine liberal candidate in the running, Fukuyama notes the failure of the Tahrir Square activists to translate protest into a structured political movement. Read more »

March 8th, 2012

Stanford's Fukuyama launches new project to measure governance

Measuring the quality of governance is a challenge for social scientists trying to assess a country’s ability to deliver public services to its citizens. Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute, recognized that many of the current ways to assess good governance are too general and do not account for the variations that occur within complex societies such as China or the United States. Fukuyama has also realized that democracy is not always a necessary ingredient for good governance and in some cases authoritarian countries govern more effectively than their democratic counterparts. Read more »

February 1st, 2012

Stanford democracy experts examine Asia, Middle East

CDDRL scholars Larry Diamond, Francis Fukuyama, and Ahmed Benchemsi published articles in the January issue of the Journal of Democracy examining the state of democratic development in two pivotal regions – Asia and the Middle East. Read more »

January 23rd, 2012

Stanford scholars reflect on Arab Spring

A year after the Egyptian uprising, five scholars talk about democracy in the Middle East, how lives have changed in the Arab world, and what the U.S. has learned from the Arab Spring. Read more »