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 professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His 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 edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests (2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy (2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).

During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.

Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World; Will China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.

Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.

Won-soo Kim graduated from the College of Law of the Seoul National University (bachelor of law) in Korea, and received his M.A. from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University. He pursued graduate legal study as a doctoral (JSD) candidate at Stanford Law School. At Stanford, he also worked as a visiting fellow at CISAC between 1994 and 1995, and at APARC between 1995 and 1996.

Kim has pursued a foreign service career since joining the Korean Foreign Ministry in 1978. He has worked as the second secretary in the Korean Embassy in Washington, DC, and as the deputy director of the North America Division in the Foreign Ministry. He subsequently served as the political counselor in the Korean Embassy in New Delhi, and as the director of the Treaties Division in the Foreign Ministry.

In 1996-97, Kim served as the alternate representative of the Republic of Korea to the United Nations Security Council. During that period, Korea was a nonpermanent member of the Security Council for the first time, and sought to contribute substantively to international peace and security. Kim also worked as the political counselor of the Korean Mission to the UN until 1999.

Most recently, Kim worked at the Office of the President of the Republic of Korea as the secretary to the president for foreign affairs and trade (2002-03), as well as international security affairs (2000-02). During that period, he was in charge of overall coordination of Korea-s foreign policy on major issues, including the North Korean nuclear problem and management of the Korea-US alliance. Since September 2003, he has been in residence as a visiting scholar at APARC.