Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist and senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, will be the next director of the institute’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

Fukuyama will take the helm as CDDRL’s fourth director on Sept. 1. He will succeed Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at FSI who has directed CDDRL since 2009.

“Frank Fukuyama’s renowned scholarship and profile among the world's top political scientists puts him in a perfect position to lead CDDRL,” said FSI Director Michael McFaul, who announced Fukuyama’s appointment on April 17.

“Larry Diamond has been a powerful director, and we are grateful he will still be very involved with the center and FSI," McFaul said. "We are looking forward to CDDRL’s growth under Frank's leadership."

Fukuyama joined the Stanford faculty as FSI’s Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow in 2010. He has been in residency at CDDRL since then, and has played an active role in the center’s research programming. He launched the Governance Project in 2012 to develop better measure of governance. He collaborated with other faculty members to start the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective, which investigates problems confronting American democracy.

“I am very excited to be succeeding Larry Diamond as the director.  Larry has done a tremendous job over the past six years in building CDDRL into an internationally recognized institution, and I hope to continue in his footsteps,” Fukuyama said.

Fukuyama has written extensively about democracy and political economy. His book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in more than 20 foreign editions since its publication in 1992. His most recent books are Political Order and Political Decay:  From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy; The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution; and  America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy.

Fukuyama has bolstered CDDRL’s teaching mission as faculty director of the Undergraduate Senior Honors Program, which trains Stanford students to write a thesis on a topic related to democratic development. Fukuyama also plays a key teaching role in the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program, which attracts global democracy leaders to Stanford every year for academic training.

"Frank Fukuyama is the most influential scholar of political development in the world today,” Diamond said. “His writing, speaking, and teaching have reshaped the way we think about the interactions among economic development, democracy, rule of law, and the growth of state capacity.  I am thrilled – as I know our faculty and students will be – that he has agreed to serve as the next director of our CDDRL.  He will give the center energetic, visionary and wise leadership."

In 2014, Fukuyama brought the Leadership Academy for Development Program to Stanford from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies where he previously served as the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy. The LAD program trains emerging public sector leaders in developing countries to advance economic development.

Fukuyama received his bachelor’s from Cornell and his doctorate in political science from Harvard. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation from 1979 to 1980, then again from 1983 to 1989 and from 1995 to 1996. He served twice in the 1980s as a member of the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department and was a member of the U.S. delegation to the Egyptian-Israeli talks on Palestinian autonomy.

From 1996 to 2000, Fukuyama was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. He served as a member of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001 through 2004. 

Fukuyama is chairman of the editorial board of The American Interest, which he helped establish in 2005. He serves on the boards of the Rand Corporation, the Pardee Rand Graduate School, the Volker Initiative, the Institute for American Values, and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center. He is a member of the American Political Science Association and the Council on Foreign Relations.