Aurora Forum at Stanford University: Democracy and the Middle East April 20, 2006

In his recent book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, Professor Larry Diamond identifies four key elements of democracy: "choosing and replacing the government through free and fair elections; active citizen participation in politics and civic life; protection of the human rights of all citizens; and the rule of law, in which the regulations and procedures apply equally to all citizens." What are the prospects and problems for implementing these principles throughout the Middle East? Professor Diamond will discuss this and other questions with another Hoover Fellow, Abbas Milani, co-director of Hoover's Iran Democracy Project and director of Stanford's new Iranian Studies Program.

Larry Diamond
A senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor by courtesy of political science and sociology at Stanford, Larry Diamond has served as coeditor of the widely respected Journal of Democracy since its founding in 1990. From January to April 2004, he served as a senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. A Stanford PhD, he 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.

Abbas Milani
A research fellow and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution with an appointment in Stanford?s Department of Political Science, Abbas Milani is the author of Tales of Two Cities: A Persian Memoir (1996), Modernity and Its Foes in Iran (1998); and Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Persian Modernity in Iran (2004). He received his BA in political science and economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970, and his PhD in political science from the University of Hawaii in 1974. He was a research fellow at the Iranian Center for Social Research from 1977 to 1978 and an assistant professor at the National University of Iran from 1975 to 1977.

Erik Jensen (moderator)
Erik Jensen is lecturer at the Stanford Law School and faculty member at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He has been a Fulbright scholar, a consultant to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, and a representative of The Asia Foundation, where he currently serves as a senior law advisor.

http://auroraforum.org/events.featured.042006.php