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 2002–3, 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.

He is also co-director of the National Endowment for Democracy's International Forum for Democratic Studies, which sponsors scholarly research and publications and coordinates an international network of democracy research institutes.

During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior advisor on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. He is now lecturing and writing about the challenges of post-conflict state-building in Iraq and comparatively, and about the challenges of democratic development and democracy promotion worldwide.

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 (Johns Hopkins, 1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (Carnegie Corporation of New York, 1999), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (Macmillan, 1988). He has also edited or co-edited more than 25 books, including the series Democracy in Developing Countries (which has produced six books on three regions since it was first published in 1989).

His recent edited books include: Assessing the Quality of Democracy (with Leonardo Morlino, 2005), Islam and Democracy in the Middle East (with Marc F. Plattner and Daniel Brumberg, 2003), Political Parties and Democracy (with Richard Gunther, 2001), all published by the Journal of Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press. With Marc F. Plattner he has edited ten other Journal of Democracy books as well, including The Global Resurgence of Democracy (1996), The Global Divergence of Democracies (2001), Democracy in East Asia (1998), Democracy in Africa (1999), and Democracy after Communism (2002).

Among his other edited books are: Elections and Democracy in Greater China (with Ramon Myers, 2001), Institutional Reform and Democratic Consolidation in Korea (with Doh Chull Shin, 2000), The Self-Restraining State: Power and Accountability in New Democracies (with Andreas Schedler and Marc F. Plattner, 1999), Transition without End: Nigerian Politics and Civil Society under Babangida (with Anthony Kirk-Greene and Oyeleye Oyediran, 1997); Political Culture and Democracy in Developing Countries (1993); and Israeli Democracy under Stress (with Ehud Sprinzak, 1993).

Larry Diamond received all of his degrees from Stanford University, including a B.A. in 1974, an M.A. in 1978, and a Ph.D. in Sociology in 1980. He taught Sociology at Vanderbilt University from 1980-85 before joining the Hoover Institution.