Barbara F. Walter is one of the world’s leading experts on civil wars, violent extremism and domestic terror. She is the author of five books and dozens of articles on these subjects and is a contributor to CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, the BBC and the PBS NewsHour. She has written for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Time, The New Republic, Reuters and Foreign Affairs.

She is a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a TED2023 speaker. Her most recent book on civil wars, New York Times bestseller “How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them,” was named the best book of the year by The Times (UK), and one of the best books of the year by the Financial Times, Esquire and Prospect Magazine. The New York Times Book Review called the book “Required reading for anyone invested in preserving our 246-year experiment in self-government.”

Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. His books include, On Freedom (2024); On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017); and The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018).

Joanne B. Freeman, Professor of History, specializes in the politics and political culture of the revolutionary and early national periods of American History. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Virginia. Her most recent book, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (Yale University Press), won the Best Book award from the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic, and her edited volume, Alexander Hamilton: Writings (Library of America) was one of the Atlantic Monthly’s “best books” of 2001. Her current project, The Field of Blood: Congressional Violence in Antebellum America, explores physical violence in the U.S. Congress between 1830 and the Civil War, and what it suggests about the institution of Congress, the nature of American sectionalism, the challenges of a young nation’s developing democracy, and the longstanding roots of the Civil War.

Daniel Ziblatt is the director of Harvard University’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies where he is also Eaton Professor of Government at Harvard University. He leads a research group based in Germany at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. His research focuses on Europe and the comparative study of democracy. He is the author of four books, including How Democracies Die (2018), co-authored with Steven Levitsky, a New York Times best-seller and described by The Economist magazine as “the most important book of the Trump era.” In 2023, he published Tyranny of the Minority (w/ Steve Levitsky), an analysis of American democracy in comparative perspective, also a New York Times bestseller.

Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He is Senior Fellow at the Kettering Foundation and a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions, with a focus on Latin America. He is co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times Best-Seller and was published in 30 languages, and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a Professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University. She writes about fascism, authoritarianism, propaganda, and the threats these present to democracies around the world.

Her most recent book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (2020; paperback, 2021), looks at how illiberal leaders use propaganda, corruption, violence, and machismo, and how they can be defeated. She is the recipient of Guggenheim, Fulbright, and other fellowships, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and a 2023 Maggie and Dan Inouye Distinguished Chair of Democratic Ideals at the University of Hawaii. She publishes Lucid, a Substack newsletter on threats to democracy in the U.S. and abroad.

She writes for CNN, The Economist, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She has appeared in many documentaries about dictators and threats to democracy, such as Netflix’s How To Become a Tyrant and PBS’s The Dictators’ Playbook.

Join United to Preserve Democracy and the Rule of Law for a livestream event with world-renowned presidential historian, Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times #1 best-selling author Doris Kearns Goodwin. In this moderated discussion, Goodwin will provide insights from her five decades of scholarship and how our shared history can help guide us in navigating the current political climate.

Join us for an engaging event hosted by United to Preserve: Democracy and the Rule of Law, co-sponsored by DemocracyFIRST.