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* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

 

Register in advance for this webinar: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/8416226562432/WN_WLYcdRa6T5Cs1MMdmM0Mug

 

About the Event: Is there a place for illegal or nonconsensual evidence in security studies research, such as leaked classified documents? What is at stake, and who bears the responsibility, for determining source legitimacy? Although massive unauthorized disclosures by WikiLeaks and its kindred may excite qualitative scholars with policy revelations, and quantitative researchers with big-data suitability, they are fraught with methodological and ethical dilemmas that the discipline has yet to resolve. I argue that the hazards from this research—from national security harms, to eroding human-subjects protections, to scholarly complicity with rogue actors—generally outweigh the benefits, and that exceptions and justifications need to be articulated much more explicitly and forcefully than is customary in existing work. This paper demonstrates that the use of apparently leaked documents has proliferated over the past decade, and appeared in every leading journal, without being explicitly disclosed and defended in research design and citation practices. The paper critiques incomplete and inconsistent guidance from leading political science and international relations journals and associations; considers how other disciplines from journalism to statistics to paleontology address the origins of their sources; and elaborates a set of normative and evidentiary criteria for researchers and readers to assess documentary source legitimacy and utility. Fundamentally, it contends that the scholarly community (researchers, peer reviewers, editors, thesis advisors, professional associations, and institutions) needs to practice deeper reflection on sources’ provenance, greater humility about whether to access leaked materials and what inferences to draw from them, and more transparency in citation and research strategies.

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About the Speaker: Christopher Darnton is a CISAC affiliate and an associate professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. He previously taught at Reed College and the Catholic University of America, and holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. He is the author of Rivalry and Alliance Politics in Cold War Latin America (Johns Hopkins, 2014) and of journal articles on US foreign policy, Latin American security, and qualitative research methods. His International Security article, “Archives and Inference: Documentary Evidence in Case Study Research and the Debate over U.S. Entry into World War II,” won the 2019 APSA International History and Politics Section Outstanding Article Award. He is writing a book on the history of US security cooperation in Latin America, based on declassified military documents.

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I am a huge fan of transparency about platform content moderation. I’ve considered it a top policy priority for years, and written about it in detail (with Paddy Leerssen, who also wrote this great piece about recommendation algorithms and transparency). I sincerely believe that without it, we are unlikely to correctly diagnose current problems or arrive at wise legal solutions.

So it pains me to admit that I don’t really know what “transparency” I’m asking for. I don’t think many other people do, either. Researchers and public interest advocates around the world can agree that more transparency is better. But, aside from people with very particular areas of interest (like political advertising), almost no one has a clear wish list. What information is really important? What information is merely nice to have? What are the trade-offs involved?

That imprecision is about to become a problem, though it’s a good kind of problem to have. A moment of real political opportunity is at hand. Lawmakers in the US, Europe, and elsewhere are ready to make some form of transparency mandatory. Whatever specific legal requirements they create will have huge consequences. The data, content, or explanations they require platforms to produce will shape our future understanding of platform operations, and our ability to respond — as consumers, as advocates, or as democracies. Whatever disclosures the laws don’t require, may never happen.

It’s easy to respond to this by saying “platforms should track all the possible data, we’ll see what’s useful later!” Some version of this approach might be justified for the very biggest “gatekeeper” or “systemically important” platforms. Of course, making Facebook or Google save all that data would be somewhat ironic, given the trouble they’ve landed in by storing similar not-clearly-needed data about their users in the past. (And the more detailed data we store about particular takedowns, the likelier it is to be personally identifiable.)

For any platform, though, we should recognize that the new practices required for transparency reporting comes at a cost. That cost might include driving platforms to adopt simpler, blunter content rules in their Terms of Service. That would reduce their expenses in classifying or explaining decisions, but presumably lead to overly broad or narrow content prohibitions. It might raise the cost of adding “social features” like user comments enough that some online businesses, like retailers or news sites, just give up on them. That would reduce some forms of innovation, and eliminate useful information for Internet users. For small and midsized platforms, transparency obligations (like other expenses related to content moderation) might add yet another reason to give up on competing with today’s giants, and accept an acquisition offer from an incumbent that already has moderation and transparency tools. Highly prescriptive transparency obligations might also drive de facto standardization and homogeneity in platform rules, moderation practices, and features.

None of these costs provides a reason to give up on transparency — or even to greatly reduce our expectations. But all of them are reasons to be thoughtful about what we ask for. It would be helpful if we could better quantify these costs, or get a handle on what transparency reporting is easier and harder to do in practice.

I’ve made a (very in the weeds) list of operational questions about transparency reporting, to illustrate some issues that are likely to arise in practice. I think detailed examples like these are helpful in thinking through both which kinds of data matter most, and how much precision we need within particular categories. For example, I personally want to know with great precision how many government orders a platform received, how it responded, and whether any orders led to later judicial review. But to me it seems OK to allow some margin of error for platforms that don’t have standardized tracking and queuing tools, and that as a result might modestly mis-count TOS takedowns (either by absolute numbers or percent).

I’ll list that and some other recommendations below. But these “recommendations” are very tentative. I don’t know enough to have a really clear set of preferences yet. There are things I wish I could learn from technologists, activists, and researchers first. The venues where those conversations would ordinarily happen — and, importantly, where observers from very different backgrounds and perspectives could have compared the issues they see, and the data they most want — have been sadly reduced for the past year.

So here is my very preliminary list:

  • Transparency mandates should be flexible enough to accommodate widely varying platform practices and policies. Any de facto push toward standardization should be limited to the very most essential data.
  • The most important categories of data are probably the main ones listed in the DSA: number of takedowns, number of appeals, number of successful appeals. But as my list demonstrates, those all can become complicated in practice.
  • It’s worth taking the time to get legal transparency mandates right. That may mean delegating exact transparency rules to regulatory agencies in some countries, or conducting studies prior to lawmaking in others.
  • Once rules are set, lawmakers should be very reluctant to move the goalposts. If a platform (especially a smaller one) invests in rebuilding its content moderation tools to track certain categories of data, it should not have to overhaul those tools soon because of changed legal requirements.
  • We should insist on precise data in some cases, and tolerate more imprecision in others (based on the importance of the issue, platform capacity, etc.). And we should take the time to figure out which is which.
  • Numbers aren’t everything. Aggregate data in transparency reports ultimately just tell us what platforms themselves think is going on. To understand what mistakes they make, or what biases they may exhibit, independent researchers need to see the actual content involved in takedown decisions. (This in turn raises a slough of issues about storing potentially unlawful content, user privacy and data protection, and more.)

It’s time to prioritize. Researchers and civil society should assume we are operating with a limited transparency “budget,” which we must spend wisely — asking for the information we can best put to use, and factoring in the cost. We need better understanding of both research needs and platform capabilities to do this cost-benefit analysis well. I hope that the window of political opportunity does not close before we manage to do that.

Daphne Keller

Daphne Keller

Director of the Program on Platform Regulation
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Keller explains some of the issues currently surrounding platform regulation
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In a new blog post, Daphne Keller, Director of the Program on Platform Regulation at the Cyber Policy Center, looks at the need for transparency when it comes to content moderation and asks, what kind of transparency do we really want?

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Please note: the start time for this event has been moved from 3:00 to 3:15pm.

Join FSI Director Michael McFaul in conversation with Richard Stengel, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. They will address the role of entrepreneurship in creating stable, prosperous societies around the world.

Richard Stengel Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Special Guest United States Department of State

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616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
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Michael McFaul is the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in Political Science, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, all at Stanford University. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1995 and served as FSI Director from 2015 to 2025. He is also an international affairs analyst for MSNOW.

McFaul served for five years in the Obama administration, first as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014).

McFaul has authored ten books and edited several others, including, most recently, Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder, as well as From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia, (a New York Times bestseller) Advancing Democracy Abroad: Why We Should, How We Can; and Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin.

He is a recipient of numerous awards, including an honorary PhD from Montana State University; the Order for Merits to Lithuania from President Gitanas Nausėda of Lithuania; Order of Merit of Third Degree from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, and the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford University. In 2015, he was the Distinguished Mingde Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Center at Peking University.

McFaul was born and raised in Montana. He received his B.A. in International Relations and Slavic Languages and his M.A. in Soviet and East European Studies from Stanford University in 1986. As a Rhodes Scholar, he completed his D. Phil. in International Relations at Oxford University in 1991. 

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The United States has a growing inventory of spent nuclear fuel from commercial power plants that continues to accumulate at reactor sites around the country.

In addition, the legacy waste from U.S. defense programs remains at Department of Energy sites around the country, mainly at Hanford, WA, Savannah River, SC, and at Idaho National Laboratory.

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But now the U.S. nuclear waste storage program is “frozen in place”, according to Rod Ewing, Frank Stanton professor in nuclear security at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.

“The processing and handling of waste is slow to stopped and in this environment the pressure has become very great to do something.”

Currently, more than seventy thousand metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from civilian reactors is sitting in temporary aboveground storage facilities spread across 35 states, with many of the reactors that produced it shut down.  And U.S. taxpayers are paying the utilities billions of dollars to keep it there.

Meanwhile, the deep geologic repository where all that waste was supposed to go, in Yucca Mountain Nevada, is now permanently on hold, after strong resistance from Nevada residents and politicians led by U.S. Senator Harry Reid.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad New Mexico, the world’s first geologic repository for transuranic waste, has been closed for over a year due to a release of radioactivity.

And other parts of the system, such as the vitrification plant at Hanford and the mixed oxide fuel plant at Savannah River , SC, are way behind schedule and over budget.

It’s a growing problem that’s unlikely to change this political season.

“The chances of dealing with it in the current Congress are pretty much nil, in my view,” said former U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM).

“We’re not going to see a solution to this problem this year or next year.”

The issue in Congress is generally divided along political lines, with Republicans wanting to move forward with the original plan to build a repository at Yucca Mountain, while Democrats support the recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future to create a new organization to manage nuclear waste in the U.S. and start looking for a new repository location using an inclusive, consent-based process.

“One of the big worries that I have with momentum loss is loss of nuclear competency,” said David Clark, a Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

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“So we have a whole set of workers who have been trained, and have been working on these programs for a number of years. When you put a program on hold, people go find something else to do.”

Meanwhile, other countries are moving ahead with plans for their own repositories, with Finland and Sweden leading the pack, leaving the U.S. lagging behind.

So Ewing decided to convene a series of high-level conferences, where leading academics and nuclear experts from around the world can discuss the issues in a respectful environment with a diverse range of stakeholders – including former politicians and policy makers, scientists and representatives of Indian tribes and other effected communities.

“For many of these people and many of these constituencies, I’ve seen them argue at length, and it’s usually in a situation where a lot seems to be at stake and it’s very adversarial,” said Ewing.

“So by having the meeting at Stanford, we’ve all taken a deep breath, the program is frozen in place, nothing’s going to go anywhere tomorrow, we have the opportunity to sit and discuss things. And I think that may help.”

Former Senator Bingaman said he hoped the multidisciplinary meetings, known at the “Reset of Nuclear Waste Management Strategy and Policy Series”, would help spur progress on this pressing problem.

“There is a high level of frustration by people who are trying to find a solution to this problem of nuclear waste, and there’s no question that the actions that we’ve taken thus far have not gotten us very far,” Bingaman said.

“I think that’s why this conference that is occurring is a good thing, trying to think through what are the problems that got us into the mess we’re in, and how do we avoid them in the future.”

The latest conference, held earlier this month, considered the question of how to structure a new nuclear waste management organization in the U.S.

Speakers from Sweden, Canada and France brought an international perspective and provided lessons learned from their countries nuclear waste storage programs.

“The other…major programs, France, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Canada, they all reached a crisis point, not too different from our own,” said Ewing.

“And at this crisis point they had to reevaluate how they would go forward. They each chose a slightly different path, but having thought about it, and having selected a new path, one can also observe that their programs are moving forward.”

France has chosen to adopt a closed nuclear cycle to recycle spent fuel and reuse it to generate more electricity.

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“It means that the amount of waste that we have to dispose of is only four percent of the total volume of spent nuclear fuel which comes out of the reactor,” said Christophe Poinssot of the French Atomic and Alternative Energy Commission.

“We also reduce the toxicity because…we are removing the plutonium. And finally, we are conditioning the final waste under the form of nuclear glass, the lifetime of which is very long, in the range of a million years in repository conditions.”

Clark said that Stanford was the perfect place to convene a multidisciplinary group of thought leaders in the field who could have a real impact on the future of nuclear waste storage policy.

“The beauty of a conference like this, and holding it at a place like Stanford University and CISAC, is that all the right people are here,” he said.

“All the people who are here have the ability to influence, through some level of authority and scholarship, and they’ll be able to take the ideas that they’ve heard back to their different offices and different organizations.  I think it will make a difference, and I’m really happy to be part of it.”

Ewing said it was also important to include students in the conversation.

“There’s a next generation of researchers coming online, and I want to save them the time that it took me to realize what the problems are,” Ewing said.

“By mixing students into this meeting, letting them interact with all the parties, including the distinguished scientists and engineers, I’m hoping it speeds up the process.”

Professor Ewing is already planning his next conference, next March, which will focus on the consent-based process that will be used to identify a new location within the U.S. for a repository.

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Russ Feingold, the former U.S. senator perhaps best known for pushing campaign finance reform, will spend the spring quarter at Stanford lecturing and teaching.

Feingold will be the Payne Distinguished Lecturer and will be in residence at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies while teaching and mentoring graduate students in the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies and the Stanford Law School.

Feingold was recently the State Department’s  special envoy to the Great Lakes Region of Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo. He will bring his knowledge and longstanding interest in one of the most challenging, yet promising, places in Africa to campus with the cross-listed IPS and Law School course, “The Great Lakes Region of Africa and American Foreign Relations: Policy and Legal Implications of the Post-1994 Era.”

Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat who served three terms in the Senate between 1993 and 2011, co-sponsored the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. Better known as the McCain-Feingold Act, the legislation regulated the roles of soft money contributions and issue ads in national elections.

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The Fisher Family Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development Program at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is now accepting applications for our summer 2027 program, which will run from Sunday, July 18, to Friday, August 6, 2027. The deadline to apply is 11:59 pm PST on Tuesday, January 12, 2027.

The program brings together an annual cohort of approximately 30 mid-career practitioners from countries in political transition who are working to advance democratic practices and enact economic and legal reform to promote human development. Launched by CDDRL in 2005, the program was previously known as the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program. The new name reflects an endowment gift from the Fisher family — Sakurako (Sako), ‘82, and William (Bill), MBA ‘84 — that secures the future of this important and impactful program.

From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, we select our program participants from among hundreds of applicants each year for the significant contributions they have already made to their communities and their potential to make an even greater impact with some help from Stanford. We aim to give them the opportunity to join a global network of over 500 alumni from 96 countries who have all faced similar sets of challenges in bringing change to their countries.

The Fisher Family Summer Fellows Program provides an intensive 3-week on-campus forum for civil society leaders to exchange experiences and receive academic and policy training to enrich their knowledge and advance their work. Delivered by a leading Stanford faculty team composed of Michael McFaul, Kathryn Stoner, Francis Fukuyama, Larry Diamond, Erik Jensen, and more, the program allows emerging and established global leaders to explore new institutional models and frameworks to enhance their ability to promote good governance, accountable politics, and find new ways to achieve economic development in their home countries.

Prospective fellows from Ukraine are also invited to apply for our Strengthening Ukrainian Democracy and Development (SU-DD) Program, which runs concurrently with the Fisher Family Summer Fellows Program. The SU-DD program provides a unique opportunity for mid-career practitioners working on well-defined projects aimed at strengthening Ukrainian democracy, enhancing human development, and promoting good governance. Applicants to the SU-DD program will use the Fisher Family Summer Fellows Program application portal to apply and indicate their interest there. You will then be directed to a series of supplemental questions specific to the SU-DD program, including requiring a detailed description of your proposed project.

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The Fellow Spotlight Series is an inspiring and moving series of "TED"-style talks given by each of our 2026 Fisher Family Summer Fellows to share their backstories and discuss their work.
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Announcing the 2026 Class of the Fisher Family Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development Program

In July 2026, the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law will welcome a diverse cohort of 26 experienced practitioners from 19 countries who are working to advance democratic practices and economic and legal reform in contexts where freedom, human development, and good governance are fragile or at risk.
Announcing the 2026 Class of the Fisher Family Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development Program
People arrive to pay tribute at Maidan Square, where thousands of memorial flags are on display as a reminder of the toll of the war on February 24, 2025, in Kyiv, Ukraine.
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From parliament to regional government to independent media, alumni of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law’s Strengthening Ukrainian Democracy and Development Program are implementing reform initiatives under wartime conditions.
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Francis Fukuyama looks on as a group of fellows works through a case study. | Emin Huseynov
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The program will run from Sunday, July 18, to Friday, August 6, 2027. Applications are due by 11:59 pm PST on Tuesday, January 12, 2027.

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Caption Francis Fukuyama looks on as a group of fellows works through a case study. | Photo credit Emin Huseynov
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The world is in a persistent, multi-decade decline in democratic governance. Yet a few cases point the other way. Brazil’s courts held Jair Bolsonaro to account, and Hungarian voters ended Viktor Orbán’s sixteen-year rule in April 2026.

On October 14, Anna Grzymala-Busse, Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and Alberto Díaz-Cayeros, Senior Fellow at FSI and Co-Director of the Democracy Action Lab, joined moderators Larry Diamond and Debra Satz for the second session in Stanford Continuing Studies' Reimagining Democracy speaker series produced in partnership with the Office of Community Engagement, the Stanford Democracy Hub, and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). They asked what these rebounds teach about democratic resilience, and how they might inform efforts to reimagine democracy in the United States.

Latin America: crime, inequality, and the question “What have you done for me lately?”


Diamond opened the discussion with a skeptical reading of the region. El Salvador under Nayib Bukele has become a byword for human rights abuses, but it is a small country. In Brazil, Flávio Bolsonaro is favored in this month’s presidential runoff and is widely expected to pardon his father. In Mexico, critics worry that Claudia Sheinbaum’s Morena party is rebuilding the one-party hegemony of the old PRI.

Díaz-Cayeros did not dismiss those concerns. “No party in any country should have a majority like the one Morena has,” he said, adding that such a majority “has been tremendously damaging for democracy.” Still, he cautioned against assuming the worst. Despite the temptations such a majority creates for Sheinbaum, he noted, many democratic spaces in Mexico have not closed. Even newly elected populists, such as Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia and Keiko Fujimori in Peru, face real checks and balances on what they can do.

The deeper drivers, he argued, are crime and unmet expectations. Criminal organizations are well armed, increasingly sophisticated — “even into the realm of drones” — and their violence spills across borders, as Ecuador learned when groups displaced from Colombia moved south. “Nobody really knows how to solve this, and anyone who claims they do is lying,” Díaz-Cayeros said. “But the right has been particularly successful in making a claim that they know how to do it better,” promising that mano dura will control the violence.

He also pointed to what Latin American democracies have achieved. Over the past two decades, countries across the region reduced extreme inequality through conditional cash transfers embraced by governments of both left and right. And when roughly eight million Venezuelans fled the Chavista regime, neighbors absorbed them: the Dominican Republic took in two to three hundred thousand, and Ecuador about half a million.

Yet governments have failed on basic health services and decent education, and citizens notice. On Brazil, Díaz-Cayeros contrasted Lula’s transformative first presidency, which opened universities to Afro-descendant Brazilians and expanded poverty programs, with a current term that has “not a lot to show.” Many Brazilians, he said, are rightly asking what democracy has brought them in the last four years. “Can’t a political system find a younger politician that appeals to voters?” he asked, a question he said applies to the United States as well.

Finally, he warned against reading authoritarianism through a Cold War lens. Venezuela under Delcy Rodríguez and Nicaragua under Daniel Ortega show that “authoritarianism doesn’t seem to have a political color. The destruction of democracy is equally possible by someone on the right and someone on the left.”

Europe: volatility, the cordon sanitaire, and a representation gap on immigration


Why do voters who feel unheard turn to leaders who are often corrupt and fail to deliver, Satz asked. Grzymala-Busse noted that no politician advertises themselves as corrupt. Populists run on a critique of the elites who came before, and in Europe they have often been able to deliver material gains. Fidesz “very ably targeted” vast EU subsidies to rural Hungary and made good on its promise to raise living standards. “That house of cards collapsed because the government was so corrupt. But for 16 years, it worked.” Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) government benefited from EU funds in the same way.

Asked whether Europe faces a long period of alternation between liberal and illiberal governments — as with Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic and Robert Fico in Slovakia, both of whom lost power and returned — Grzymala-Busse distinguished between East and West. Since 1989, post-communist Europe has had the highest electoral volatility of any region, including Latin America, so today’s swings partly continue an old pattern.

Western Europe faces a different problem: the elite cordon sanitaire. Outside Italy, where Giorgia Meloni governs, mainstream parties in Austria, Germany, and France have agreed to keep far-right populists out of power. “That bargain has held so far,” she said, “but when you have 30, 40 percent of the population voting for the AfD, how sustainable is that? How democratic is it to keep out of power the party that won the plurality of the vote?” The Alternative for Germany began in the early 2010s as an economists’ party opposed to the Greek bailout before an internal coup turned it into a nationalist, anti-immigrant force.

On immigration, she cited polling conducted with the Hoover Institution this summer. The top issue for European voters is not immigration but “public services and the economic situation — they care about the same stuff that voters everywhere care about.” Immigration, however, is the issue on which voters feel least represented. Supporters of center-right and center-left parties alike see their parties as far to their left; only right-wing populist voters feel aligned with their party.

She added that disinformation, much of it seeded by Russia, China, and Iran, takes hold because “the uptake is domestic.” In Europe, populists in power can also capture public broadcasters, as in Poland, where the equivalent of NPR “became a government propaganda channel.”

Rebuilding democracy is possible


How do democrats rebuild once they return to power? Grzymala-Busse contrasted Poland and Hungary. In Poland, Donald Tusk’s coalition defeated PiS in 2023, but a president from the illiberal camp has vetoed reform after reform. The sharpest problem is the judiciary, where the previous government appointed roughly a third of the judges. “They need to be dealt with democratically,” she said. “You cannot reestablish democracy through anti-democratic means.”

Hungary is “a much simpler story.” Péter Magyar and the Tisza party won a landslide and a parliamentary supermajority, and they are reversing Fidesz’s institutional changes while the EU releases more funds. “But that’s not really a lesson for other countries,” Grzymala-Busse cautioned, “because very few of them enjoy that kind of absolute landslide victory.”

Asked what citizens and institutions can do, she offered two lessons:

  • Citizens must keep demanding and participating. “Autocrats really benefit from popular indifference, from popular alienation, and above all from popular despair.” Illiberal incumbents are defeated through landslides that cannot be denied.
     
  • Oppositions must make corruption concrete. Calling a government anti-democratic “doesn’t get us very far.” What works is telling citizens that “this government’s corruption is costing you” better schools, better roads, and a better life.


Satz pressed further: democracy is not only an instrument for delivering goods but has value in itself, because it gives people control over their lives. Díaz-Cayeros agreed that this liberal dimension is what has been lost. Majoritarian impulses have eroded the sense that an independent judiciary or electoral authority matters “just because the people have voted.”

Grzymala-Busse said European democrats have succeeded by framing liberal values in patriotic terms: abandoning checks and balances is a betrayal of national history, and attacking the free press is an outrage “in the birthplace of the freedom of speech.” In the American context, she suggested, the equivalent message is that dismantling checks and balances or going after the media is un-American.

Díaz-Cayeros raised a further concern for the United States: its outsized influence on Latin American elections. In Peru and Colombia, he said, voters described how President Trump’s endorsements on Truth Social created echo chambers around favored candidates. He also warned about unregulated platforms. In Brazil, evidence suggests that anti-Bolsonaro outlets were disproportionately left exposed to cyberattacks, and the Facebook page of one of the last human rights organizations operating in El Salvador has been down for weeks.

How bad could it get?


To close, Diamond asked both speakers to look over the horizon. What if Marine Le Pen wins the French presidency and the AfD performs nationally as it has in eastern German states? What if Flávio Bolsonaro returns to power, pardons his father?

Grzymala-Busse was cautiously optimistic that Europe will not repeat the 1930s. Then, voters faced a choice between anti-democratic options on the far right and the far left, and the economic situation was far worse. Today, parties legitimate themselves through elections. Meloni also offers another path: “someone who makes very extreme statements while campaigning, but then once in office” governs as a conservative without violating democratic norms.

Díaz-Cayeros likewise doubted that Latin America would return to the era of military dictatorships and mass disappearances. The Bukele regime in El Salvador “is as bad as it can get,” he said, but Brazil’s federalism, vibrant civil society, and fifty-year human rights legacy make that model unlikely there. His greatest concern was global rather than national: “The Amazon is a humanity commons,” he said, and the world “should not let Flávio Bolsonaro burn the Amazon.”

Satz closed by returning to Grzymala-Busse’s call to demand and participate. Reining in illegitimate power, she said, depends on citizens who know their rights and refuse to feel hopeless or helpless.

The Reimagining Democracy series continues next week, when Brandice Canes-Wrone of the Center for Revitalizing American Institutions and Didi Kuo of CDDRL will discuss money, parties, and political reform.

Key takeaways


Listening to Grzymala-Busse and Díaz-Cayeros side by side, I came away with a few lessons that cut across both regions and that are extremely informative for those fighting for democracy anywhere.

  1. Backsliding grows out of three gaps. Democracies falter when they fail to deliver, when mainstream parties ignore the issues voters care about most, such as immigration in Europe and crime in Latin America, and when majorities stop valuing courts, electoral bodies, and a free press. Illiberal leaders don’t create these gaps; they exploit them.
     
  2. Illiberal governments can deliver, for a while. Orbán held power for sixteen years in part because EU money let him raise living standards. Warning that he was undemocratic did little. What finally hurt him was corruption that voters could see and feel.
     
  3. Reversal requires decisive wins. Hungary is rebuilding quickly because Tisza won a supermajority. Poland is stuck because the illiberal camp still holds the presidency. A narrow victory may be enough to take office, but not to repair institutions, and repair has to happen by democratic means.
     
  4. Society sets the floor. Díaz-Cayeros believes Brazil will not become El Salvador because of its federalism, its vibrant civil society, and its strong human rights tradition. These structures decide how far a democracy can fall. They can’t be built in a crisis, though, so the time to raise that floor is while democracy is still healthy.
     
  5. Recovery is not permanent. Babiš, Fico, and possibly Flávio Bolsonaro show that defeated illiberal movements return when restored governments disappoint. Lula’s second term is a warning: democrats must keep delivering and renewing their leadership.
     
  6. Democracy must be argued for, not assumed. The speakers pointed to strategies that work: making the costs of corruption concrete, framing checks and balances in patriotic terms as part of national identity, and taking on hard issues without abandoning liberal principles.


In summary, democracy came back when broad coalitions won convincingly on concrete grievances and then governed well enough to keep their majorities. Above all, as Grzymala-Busse put it, autocrats benefit from indifference and despair. Democracy's most important resource is citizens who keep demanding and participating.

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In a recent session of Stanford Continuing Studies’ "Reimagining Democracy" series, Anna Grzymala-Busse and Alberto Díaz-Cayeros compared Europe and Latin America and reached a shared conclusion: democracy can recover from illiberal rule, but only where it delivers for citizens and voters keep showing up.

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In Brief
  • Anna Grzymala-Busse and Alberto Díaz-Cayeros traced democratic backsliding to unmet expectations: crime and weak public services in Latin America, and corruption plus a representation gap on immigration in Europe. Populists can deliver for years, as Orbán did, until corruption becomes something voters feel.
  • Recovery takes decisive electoral wins and democratic means. Hungary is reversing Fidesz’s changes after a supermajority victory, while Poland is stalled by a president from the illiberal camp.
  • Democracy’s defenders must keep participating, make corruption concrete, and frame checks and balances in patriotic terms. Both speakers doubt the worst historical outcomes will return, but they stressed that democracy must keep delivering to hold its gains.
  • The United States also shapes democracy abroad. Voters in Peru and Colombia described Trump’s Truth Social endorsements creating echo chambers around favored candidates, and unregulated platforms leave democracy’s defenders exposed, including anti-Bolsonaro outlets in Brazil that appear to have been disproportionately targeted by cyberattacks.
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Introduction and Contribution


Democratic “consolidation,” whereby democracy is the “only game in town,” depends on the functioning of a host of political institutions. This includes free and fair elections, respect for individual rights, and an independent judiciary. Accordingly, many countries that underwent transitions to democracy in the 1990s worked to build autonomous and impartial judicial institutions. Reformers hoped that judges with the capacity to review executive and legislative action and effectively enforce their decisions would serve as bulwarks against authoritarian reversion. 

Yet the recent wave of democratic backsliding and autocratization has demonstrated the fragility of judicial institutions. In places as diverse as Hungary, Poland, Venezuela, and Turkey, elected authoritarian leaders have sought to weaken or destroy independent judiciaries, even co-opting them to further their anti-democratic agendas. Have judges become unable to counter autocrats? Answering this question is critical for the global pro-democracy movement.

In “How Latin America's Judges are Defending Democracy,” Diego A. Zambrano, Ludmilla Martins da Silva, Rolando Garcia Miron, and Santiago P. Rodríguez show how judges in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico have made a series of innovative and forceful anti-authoritarian rulings. These outcomes are surprising in light of parallel judicial failures in Latin America and other backsliding democracies. The authors discuss six factors that help explain these outcomes: three stem from the judiciary's internal politics, and three connect to broader changes in Latin American society. Although no single factor explains all three cases, this should not detract from the broader lesson that judiciaries can serve as important pro-democracy actors. 

Three Cases of Judges Defending Democracy


Brazil: 

After the military junta fell in 1985, Brazil built strong judicial institutions, which largely remained on the political sidelines until the rise of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. During his campaign, Bolsonaro expressed his intent to manipulate the Supreme Court’s composition, suggested he would not comply with its decisions, and marched in favor of a military takeover. Meanwhile, his supporters placed explosives near the homes of Supreme Court justices and made threats against them and their families. These developments — threatening Brazilian democracy, the separation of powers, and the personal safety of judges — put significant strain on the judiciary. 

In response, the Supreme Court took the unprecedented step of ruling that it could unilaterally open investigations into government officials. It did so in cases involving those who spread false information and made defamatory accusations against judges. During COVID-19, Bolsonaro attempted to centralize the authority to impose lockdowns, which the Supreme Court rejected as violating the constitutional separation of powers.

Brazilian democracy faced its most existential threat during and after the 2022 elections. In response to Bolsonaro and his supporters promoting conspiracy theories about election fraud, the Supreme Court issued press releases attesting to the elections’ democratic integrity. And after the infamous Brazilian coup plot, the Court investigated Bolsonaro and disqualified him from running for office.

Colombia:

Colombia’s judiciary has received global recognition for its independence, defenses of human rights, and broad domestic legitimacy. It has decriminalized abortion and euthanasia while imposing limits on executive power. In 2010, it rejected President Álvaro Uribe’s unconstitutional attempt to run for a third term in office despite Uribe’s widespread support among the public and Colombian elite. And in 2023, it upheld its power to suspend evidently unconstitutional acts or those posing a “clear and present danger” to the constitutional order. These rulings demonstrate how Colombian judges have been willing to defend constitutional democracy, even when doing so requires confronting powerful executives.

Mexico:

Much like in Brazil under Bolsonaro, Mexico’s judiciary faced a critical test with the rise of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) in 2018. AMLO was extremely popular, winning over 50% of the vote, while his Morena party took control of Congress. Perceiving the Supreme Court as an impediment to his populist agenda, AMLO used daily press conferences to denounce the justices as overpaid, corrupt elites. 

Initially, Supreme Court president Arturo Zaldívar was receptive to AMLO’s accusations, persuading his colleagues to accept salary and budget reductions. However, Zaldívar’s successor, Norma Piña, led a much more oppositional court. One of AMLO’s signature initiatives was to overhaul and defund the independent electoral body — the National Electoral Institute (INE) — seen as one of Mexican democracy’s most important institutions. This involved reducing INE’s staff by 85%, which would have placed free and fair elections in serious jeopardy. When the INE case reached the Supreme Court, however, the justices sided against AMLO. 

Why Have Judges Defended Democracy?


These bold and surprising cases of judicial intervention in defense of democracy call for an explanation. Accordingly, the authors consider two sets of factors, one internal and one external to the judiciary. One external factor is connected to the fact that judiciaries often side with public opinion, which has increasingly opposed authoritarian maneuvers by executives. For example, although AMLO was popular, his anti-democratic electoral reforms were not, prompting mass protests in 2023. However, this factor has a harder time explaining judicial behavior in Colombia; as mentioned, President Uribe’s proposed third term received broad public support.

Perhaps the more compelling factors are internal to Latin American judiciaries. These include increasingly prevalent rules and norms favoring tenure protections. Another important factor involves the growing number of judicial appointees who are elite lawyers, such as those from academia or private practice. Because they are unaffiliated with traditional networks of political power, these judges have arguably been more willing to act against autocrats’ wishes. 

Finally, several cases may be explained by the facts that (a) judges, like other political actors, seek to preserve their positions and (b) attacks on democratic institutions threaten those positions. In Mexico, for example, AMLO’s assault on the INE, by threatening free and fair elections, would have upset the balance of power between the executive and judiciary. A similar case could be made in Brazil, where judges sought to preserve not only their autonomy but their physical safety. No single factor can explain every judicial ruling. Together, however, they help shed light on why Latin American judiciaries have stood up to powerful and popular elected autocrats.

*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer

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Katrin Bolovtsova
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CDDRL Research-in-Brief [4-minute read]

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The Democracy Action Lab (DAL) brought its research and its practitioner-facing work to this year's Congress of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA2026), held in Paris under the theme “Republic and Revolution.” The May 2026 gathering gave DAL an opportunity to lay out, in one place, both sides of what the Lab does: rigorous research into how democracy is eroding across the region, and the applied, on-the-ground initiatives it is building in response.

Three members of the DAL team presented. Beatriz Magaloni, DAL's co-director and the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, presented survey research examining how citizens across Latin America experience and evaluate democracy — work that underpins her broader argument that popular approval and democratic legitimacy are not the same thing, and that satisfaction with a government can rise even as the institutions meant to hold it accountable are dismantled. Alberto Díaz-Cayeros, DAL's co-director, presented on the Democracy Garage, the Lab's new accelerator program supporting frontline democracy defenders across Latin America and the Caribbean, walking the room through its three-track model of hands-on advisory support, structured training, and platform-building for coordinated civic action. Hector Fuentes, a research affiliate at CDDRL, presented virtually on the Lab's Venezuela agenda, addressing the country's evolving political landscape and the questions it raises for democratic institution-building going forward.

The congress theme, “Republic and Revolution,” proved a fitting frame for conversations DAL had been having internally. Díaz-Cayeros argued in discussions around the congress that the field needs to move past treating democracy as a procedural checklist and start asking what democratic life actually feels like for the poor, the excluded, and those still living in the shadow of civil conflict and structural inequality. His point was that the rules of democratic life are not neutral since they carry hierarchies inherited from colonial and civil-conflict-era structures and that liberalism's claim to universalism can obscure that fact rather than resolve it. He pushed further still: democracy alone, he argued, is not enough. When it produces an unequal distribution of opportunity and liberty, the missing frame is a republican one, this is, a commitment to non-domination, public reason, and civic standing that goes beyond simple majority rule, paired with a state and a market theorized together rather than treated as separable problems. And against the fatalism of the “backsliding” literature, he insisted on a more agentive reading: Latin America's publics, in his words, are the most promising resource for democratic renewal, not merely the potential victims of democratic erosion.

Hector Fuentes (via Zoom) and Alberto Díaz-Cayeros present at LASA.
Hector Fuentes (via Zoom) and Alberto Díaz-Cayeros present at LASA.

The trip to Paris also served a second purpose: deepening DAL's relationship with its Academic Consortium — the Lab’s network of more than twenty leading scholars of Latin American democracy, based across the region, the United States and Europe. It anchors a shared comparative research agenda and links academic work with the frontline organizations defending democracy.

On the congress's opening evening, Tuesday, May 26, DAL hosted a dinner bringing together scholars from across the region and beyond, including Alberto Díaz-Cayeros, Beatriz Magaloni, Kim Juarez, Vicky Murillo, Andrés Malamud, Caro Torreblanca, Alicia Vázquez, Dani Campello, Cesar Zucco, Alberto Vergara, Jorge Morel, and Gabriela Vega. The evening gave DAL's leadership a chance to compare notes with consortium members on the state of democratic research in the region and to strengthen the personal and institutional ties that make the Consortium's collaborative work possible.

Scholars from across the region joined DAL for dinner on the conference's opening night.
Scholars from across the region joined DAL for dinner on the conference's opening night.

Taken together, DAL's presence at LASA2026 reflected the throughline of the Lab's work: research and practice held in the same hand, and a growing network of scholars and practitioners working to keep it that way.

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Hector Fuentes presented at LASA via Zoom as Beatriz Magaloni and Kim Juarez looked on.
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The DAL delegation presented on public opinion, the Democracy Garage, and Venezuela, and strengthened ties with its Academic Consortium over dinner in Paris.

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El Democracy Action Lab (DAL), una iniciativa del Centro sobre Democracia, Desarrollo y Estado de Derecho de la Universidad de Stanford para defensores de la democracia, se enorgullece en anunciar oficialmente la primera cohorte de The Democracy Garage, el primer programa acelerador de su tipo dedicado a fortalecer a los defensores de la democracia en primera línea en América Latina y el Caribe.

The Democracy Garage nació de una convicción simple pero urgente: la resiliencia democrática no se construye únicamente a través de ideas, sino a través del fortalecimiento de capacidades de la sociedad civil para actuar estratégicamente, usar la evidencia con eficacia, comunicar de manera persuasiva y adaptarse a entornos políticos en rápida evolución. DAL construyó este programa para cerrar una brecha persistente en el apoyo a la democracia, tendiendo un puente entre la investigación de alto nivel y las necesidades operativas en tiempo real de las organizaciones que hacen el trabajo más difícil sobre el terreno.

Durante los próximos meses, DAL trabajará codo a codo con ocho extraordinarias organizaciones en la región, aplicando una metodología estructurada de acelerador para co-desarrollar estrategias adaptadas a los desafíos democráticos específicos de cada país. Este no es un programa de crecimiento tradicional: es una asociación profunda y colaborativa basada en la evidencia, la estrategia y la solidaridad.

Un Modelo Acelerador de Tres Ejes


El modelo acelerador de The Democracy Garage se organiza en torno a tres ejes que se refuerzan mutuamente, diseñados para abordar una brecha clave en el ecosistema de apoyo democrático: muchos programas ofrecen formación de alto nivel desconectada de las necesidades inmediatas, o asistencia técnica a corto plazo que no genera capacidad duradera. The Garage tiende ese puente.

Eje 1  |  Análisis de Evidencia para la Estrategia Democrática  —  Asesoría Práctica

El primer eje proporciona apoyo de asesoría directa, orientada a los problemas. Cada organización  entra al Garage con un desafío concreto y actual. DAL moviliza su capacidad analítica — incluyendo la experiencia de su cuerpo docente, la participación de estudiantes y herramientas de datos — para abordarlo de forma colaborativa. No se trata de asistencia técnica unidireccional: es un proceso conjunto que desarrolla la propia capacidad de las organizaciones para usar la evidencia como herramienta estratégica, transitando de modos reactivos a anticipatorios.

Eje 2  |  Formación y Fortalecimiento de Capacidades  —  Cuatro Áreas Fundamentales

El segundo eje ofrece formación estructurada en cuatro áreas críticas para la acción democrática: (1) Estrategia para la defensa democrática — comprender el estado de la democracia en la región y sus principales desafíos; (2) IA para el activismo — aplicaciones prácticas de la inteligencia artificial para monitoreo, comunicación y toma de decisiones; (3) Evidencia para la defensa democrática — recolección, análisis e interpretación de datos vinculados directamente a las decisiones estratégicas; y (4) Narrativa para el cambio — traducir el análisis complejo en narrativas persuasivas que resuenen con tomadores de decisiones, medios de comunicación y ciudadanos.

Eje 3  |  Construcción de Plataformas para la Defensa Democrática  —  Escalar el Impacto Sistémico

El tercer eje apoya a las organizaciones  para que se conviertan en nodos fundacionales de plataformas nacionales de defensa democrática. El deterioro democrático rara vez se produce de forma aislada: requiere respuestas coordinadas entre la sociedad civil, los medios, la academia y las instituciones. A través del mapeo de actores, la articulación de redes y el desarrollo de mecanismos de coordinación, el Garage contribuye a construir ecosistemas estructurados capaces de acción colectiva. Este eje culmina en el Encuentro Regional de Sinergias en agosto de 2026, donde las organizaciones presentarán su visión de plataforma y sentarán las bases para la coordinación regional.

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Diagram of Democracy Action Lab's Democracy Garage accelerator methodology, showing three mutually reinforcing tracks — Advisory, Training, and Platform Building — leading to a Regional Synergy Meeting and stronger democratic ecosystems.


Metodología de aceleración de DAL (haga clic para ampliar)

Ocho Organizaciones. Tres Países. Una Región.


Tras un riguroso proceso de selección, The Democracy Garage se enorgullece en dar la bienvenida a las siguientes organizaciones participantes:

CESJUL — Centro de Estudios Socio Jurídicos Latinoamericanos (Colombia)  

Trabaja en la intersección del derecho penal, los derechos humanos y la gobernanza democrática, aportando análisis jurídico riguroso a los desafíos más urgentes de la democracia colombiana — incluyendo el uso del derecho tanto como herramienta de represión como vehículo de rendición de cuentas.

Dejusticia (Colombia)

Una de las organizaciones de derechos humanos más respetadas de América Latina — un auténtico think-and-do tank que combina investigación jurídica rigurosa con litigio estratégico, incidencia directa y formación de capacidades en antidiscriminación, justicia transicional y protección del espacio cívico.

Instituto Sou da Paz (Brazil)

Referente en política de seguridad pública en Brasil durante 25 años, influyendo en la legislación nacional sobre regulación de armas y reducción de homicidios mediante un enfoque basado en evidencia que centra a las comunidades más afectadas por la violencia, en particular la población negra brasileña.

Pacto pela Democracia (Brazil)

La principal coalición pro-democracia de Brasil, integrada por más de 200 organizaciones y reconocida internacionalmente como modelo de defensa democrática colectiva. Su protección coordinada de las elecciones de 2022 — más de 80 acciones entre 35 organizaciones — demostró el poder de construir coaliciones antes de que llegue la crisis.

Instituto de Estudios Peruanos (IEP) (Perú)

Una de las instituciones de ciencias sociales más antiguas y distinguidas de América Latina, el IEP ha construido durante seis décadas la base empírica del análisis democrático en el Perú — desde encuestas de opinión pública y estudios electorales hasta investigación interdisciplinaria sobre poder, desigualdad y el Estado.

Recambio (Perú)

En un país que ha tenido ocho presidentes en una década, Recambio reconstruye la cultura democrática desde dentro del sistema político — con una red de más de 500 egresados de 28 partidos políticos, diálogo interpartidario y la iniciativa 'Voces Contra la Polarización'.

Espacio Crítico (Regional, LAC)

Una organización regional que brinda apoyo estratégico personalizado, formación técnica y asesoría en seguridad a organizaciones de la sociedad civil, periodistas independientes y líderes políticos en la primera línea del retroceso democrático en América Latina y el Caribe.

D-Hub (Regional, Global)

Una comunidad global de defensores de la democracia que conecta a activistas de primera línea y organizaciones de la sociedad civil con expertos que han enfrentado desafíos similares — construyendo la infraestructura para la solidaridad democrática transfronteriza que ninguna organización puede sostener sola.

Un Hito Histórico


The Democracy Garage es el primer programa acelerador de este tipo diseñado específicamente para defensores de la democracia en América Latina y el Caribe. Al combinar el rigor de la investigación basada en evidencia, la agilidad de un modelo acelerador y la profundidad de una alianza a largo plazo, DAL está abriendo un camino inédito para fortalecer la resiliencia democrática — basado en la convicción de que las organizaciones más cercanas a la crisis están mejor posicionadas para afrontarla, cuando se les proporcionan las herramientas, el conocimiento y las conexiones adecuadas.

“Nos enorgullece inmensamente lanzar The Democracy Garage junto a estas ocho organizaciones extraordinarias," afirmó Beatriz Magaloni, codirectora del DAL y Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations en el Departamento de Ciencia Política. "Cada una de ellas representa lo que es la defensa de la democracia en la práctica, no en la teoría. Juntos, estamos comprometidos con algo sin precedentes: construir una comunidad de estrategia y solidaridad que fortalezca la democracia, país por país.”
 

Sobre el Democracy Action Lab

El Democracy Action Lab (DAL) es una iniciativa de investigación y estrategia con sede en el Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law de la Universidad de Stanford, dedicada a traducir las ciencias sociales en herramientas prácticas para quienes defienden la democracia. El DAL trabaja en la intersección entre la evidencia y la acción, colaborando con organizaciones de primera línea para fortalecer las instituciones democráticas, proteger el espacio cívico y contrarrestar las amenazas autoritarias en América Latina y más allá.

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El Primer Acelerador de Democracia de Este Tipo en América Latina y el Caribe.

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  • El Laboratorio de Democracia en Acción (DAL, por sus siglas en inglés) del CDDRL lanzó el primer acelerador de democracia de América Latina, el Democracy Garage (Garaje de la Democracia).
  • El programa combina la capacidad de investigación y la experiencia docente del DAL con ocho organizaciones de Colombia, Brasil y Perú.
  • Beatriz Magaloni, codirectora del DAL, calificó la iniciativa como una comunidad de estrategia y solidaridad sin precedentes, impulsada por Stanford.
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