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This panel will take a look at what’s changed in recent months in the wake of U.S.- Venezuela negotiations – and what this means for the 2024 election.
Speakers: Javier Corrales, Dwight W. Morrow 1895 professor of Political Science, Amherst College. Maryhen Jiménez, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow, University of Oxford. Sam Handlin, Associate Professor of Political Science, Swarthmore College. Francisco J. Monaldi, Director of the Latin America Energy Program and a Fellow at the Center for Energy Studies, Rice University.
Moderated by Steven Levitsky, Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies
Javier Corrales is the Dwight W. Morrow 1895 professor of Political Science at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He obtained his Ph.D. in government from Harvard University in 1996. His book, Autocracy Rising: Venezuela’s Transition to Authoritarianism will be published in May 2022. His previous book, Fixing Democracy (Oxford University Press), focuses on constituent assemblies and presidential powers in Latin America. He is also the co-author with Michael Penfold of Dragon in the Tropics: Venezuela and the Legacy of Hugo Chávez, second edition (Brookings Institution Press, 2015), with Daniel Altschuler of The Promise of Participation: Experiments in Participatory Governance in Honduras and Guatemala (Palgrave Macmillan 2013), and with Carlos Romero of U.S.-Venezuela Relations since the 1990s: Coping with Midlevel Security Threats (Routledge, 2013). He also published The Politics of LGBTQ Rights Expansion in Latin America and the Caribbean (Cambridge Elements, Cambridge University Press, 2022), and was the co-editor with Mario Pecheny of The Politics of Sexuality in Latin America (University of Pittsburgh Press 2010). He periodically teaches short courses at the University of Amsterdam. He was a Fulbright scholar in Colombia in 2016 and in Venezuela in 2005, and a Woodrow Wilson Center Fellow in 2000-01. He serves on the editorial board of Latin American Politics and Society, Political Science Quarterly, European Review of Latin America and the Caribbean, Americas Quarterly, and Global Americans. His has written opeds for The New York Times, Foreign Policy, and the Washington Post.
Maryhen Jiménez is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the University of Oxford. Prior to this, she held a Fritz Thyssen Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Latin American Centre at the University of Oxford. She obtained her PhD in Politics in 2020 at the University of Oxford. Her dissertation won the 2021 Political Science Association’s Lord Bryce Award for best dissertation in comparative politics in the United Kingdom. At Oxford, she was also a Lecturer in Politics at (Lincoln College) and a tutor for Latin American Politics. She received an MPhil in Latin American Studies from Oxford (distinction) and a BA in Political Science from Goethe University Frankfurt (distinction) and has been an academic visitor at Princeton University and CIDE (Mexico). Dr Jiménez also carried out research stays at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica and the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch in Washington DC. Her research spans the fields of comparative authoritarianism, democratization, with a particular focus on opposition parties. Dr Jiménez's work has been published at European and Latin American journals and has been cited by international newspapers and media outlets, such as, Al Jazeera, BBC, Bloomberg, Reuters, Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Clarín, Folha de S. Paulo, O Globo, El País, among others.
Sam Handlin is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College. He is the author of State Crisis in Fragile Democracies: Polarization and Political Regimes in South America (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and the co-author/co-editor of Reorganizing Popular Politics: Participation and the New Interest Regime in Latin America (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), among other published work. He is currently working on a book manuscript examining the role of secret police in authoritarian politics in contemporary Venezuela and their adoption of digital surveillance technologies.
Francisco J. Monaldi, Ph.D., is the Director of the Latin America Energy Program and a Fellow at the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. He is also a Lecturer at Rice’s Economics Department and Jones Graduate School of Business; a nonresident Fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy; and a member of the International Faculty at IESA School of Management in Venezuela, where he was the Founding Director of the Center for Energy and the Environment. He has held visiting academic positions at Stanford, Harvard, Tufts, and the Tecnológico de Monterrey. He has consulted several governments, multilateral agencies, and corporations; and authored numerous academic publications on the political economy of energy policy. Monaldi holds a Ph.D. in political science/political economy from Stanford University, an M.A. in international and development economics from Yale University, and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Universidad Católica Andrés Bello.
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. 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 25 languages. He has written or edited 12 other books, including Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2003), Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (with Lucan Way) (Princeton University Press, 2022), and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point (with Daniel Ziblatt) (Crown Publishers, 2023). He and Lucan Way are currently working on a book on democratic resilience across the world.
Presented in collaboration with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs