Date: Thursday, June 27 2013
Time: 2.00pm-3:30pm
Location: Graham Wallace Room (5th Floor, Old Building)
Speaker: Ian Shapiro
Chair: Mayling Birney, Department of International Development
Co-organized by the Department of International Development and the Department of Government Comparative Politics and Political Theory Groups
Shapiro discusses the theory of democratic transitions form the perspective of recent successes, failures, and inconclusive results in Africa and the Middle East. Particular attention will be paid to two questions:
-
Whether and to what extent it is possible to develop a theoretically useful account of the conditions for successful democratic transitions, given how critically reliant they are on contingencies of leadership and luck, and;
-
How we should think about the legitimacy of new democratic political orders, given that they are not easily created in democratic ways
Speaker biography
Ian Shapiro is Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University, where he also serves as Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. He has written widely and influentially on democracy, justice, and the methods of social inquiry. A native of South Africa, he received his J.D. from the Yale Law School and his Ph.D from the Yale Political Science Department where he has taught since 1984 and served as chair from 1999 to 2004. Shapiro is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a past fellow of the Carnegie Corporation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Cape Town, Keio University in Tokyo, and Nuffield College, Oxford. His most recent books are The Real World of Democratic Theory; Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy against Global Terror; The Flight From Reality in the Human Sciences; and Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight Over Taxing Inherited Wealth (with Michael Graetz). His current research concerns the relations between democracy and the distribution of income and wealth.