Professor Larry Diamond
Senior Fellow
Hoover Institution, Stanford University

Date : 12 September 2006 (Tuesday)
Time : 4.30pm to 6.00pm (Registration will begin at 4.00pm)
Venue : Orchard Hotel, Ballroom 3
Dress Code : Office Attire

Over the last three decades, the proportion of electoral democracies--which choose and replace their leaders in free, fair, competitive, and meaningful elections--has risen from barely a quarter of all states in the world to more than half. Levels of political freedom and civil liberties have also risen sharply around the world, and the U.S., E.U., U.N., and other international actors are engaged in unprecedented efforts to promote and support democratic development. In addition, it appears that cultures are changing in the direction of more democratic expectations and values. And a growing body of both expert and mass opinion regards democracy, with transparency and accountability, as necessary to lift the remaining poor countries of the world out of poverty. Yet many of the new democracies and quasi-democracies of the world remain quite illiberal and corrupt, while the Middle East remains particularly resistant to democratic change. Is it possible that the democratic progress of the past three decades could be sustained, to the point where we could one day see a world composed entirely of democracies? What would be necessary to bring about such a global transformation? This lecture will address the prospects and conditions for "universal democracy."

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy. He is also codirector of the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. At Stanford University, he is professor by courtesy of political science and sociology and coordinates the democracy program of the new Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. During 2002?, he served as a consultant to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report Foreign Aid in the National Interest. Currently he serves as a member of USAID's Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid. He has also advised and lectured to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other governmental and nongovernmental agencies 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. He is now lecturing and writing about the challenges of postconflict state-building in Iraq. Diamond has also worked with a group of Europeans and Americans 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. During 2004?, he has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations' Independent Task Force on United States Policy Toward Arab Reform.

Diamond has lectured, taught, and conducted research in some 25 countries over the past thirty years. During 1982?3 he was a Fulbright Visiting Lecturer at Bayero University in Kano, Nigeria. In 1997?8 he was a visiting scholar at the Sun Yat-Sen Institute of the Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. His research and policy analysis are focused on the relationship between democracy, governance, and development in poor countries, particularly in Africa.

Diamond is the author of Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq (Times Books, 2005), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation, Promoting Democracy in the 1990s, and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria. His recent edited books include Islam and Democracy in the Middle East (with Marc F. Plattner and Daniel Brumberg), Political Parties and Democracy (with Richard Gunther), The Global Resurgence of Democracy and The Global Divergence of Democracies (with Marc F. Plattner). Among his other 20 edited books is the series Democracy in Developing Countries, with Juan Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset.

Article by Larry Diamond. 2006. Democracy Remains the People's Choice . The Straits Times, 11 September.

For more information, please contact Ms Catherine Lim tel: 6516-8384 or email: