Political development and political decay — Francis Fukuyama

Welcome to season 2 of the show!

Our first guest this season is Francis Fukuyama, one of the most influential political thinkers of our time and someone who has written extensively on international politics and issues of development. He is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies(FSI) and the director of the institute’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL),. 

This conversation was recorded in mid-December 2020 at the height of the controversies surrounding the US presidential election and President Trump’s refusal to acknowledge defeat. And while a new president will shortly be sworn in on the 20th of January, deep political divisions remain. It is therefore particularly useful and timely to revisit Fukuyama’s major two-volume work on the origins of political order and political decay. In these two fascinating books published in 2011 and 2014, he provides an account of how societies develop strong, impersonal, and accountable political institutions.

We also discussed his first book, The End of History and the Last Man (1992) and his latest, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (2018).

• Francis Fukuyama on Twitter and Instagram
• Dan Banik and In Pursuit of Development on Twitter

Host:

Professor Dan Banik, 

Centre for Global Sustainability, University of Oslo

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