event

The Global Challenge of Political Polarization

Tue. October 8th, 2019
Washington, DC

Political polarization is tearing at the seams of democracies around the world, from Bangladesh, Brazil, and India, to Poland, Turkey, and the United States.  Why is polarization coming to a boil in so many different places at once? Is polarization similar everywhere or marked by substantial differences?  How can severely divided democracies restore at least some national political consensus?  Are there relevant lessons for the United States from polarized democracies elsewhere? Thomas Carothers will address these questions, drawing on the new book he has co-edited with Andrew O’Donohue, Democracies Divided: The Global Challenge of Political Polarization. Anne Applebaum, Naomi Hossain, and Sarah Yerkes will provide in-depth perspectives on key country cases.

Thomas Carothers

Thomas Carothers is senior vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In that capacity he oversees all of the research programs at Carnegie. He also directs the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program and carries out research and writing on democracy-related issues.

Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum is a columnist for the Washington Post and a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. She is also a senior fellow at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

Naomi Hossain

Naomi Hossain is a political sociologist at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, currently based at the Accountability Research Center at American University. She is the author of The Aid Lab: Understanding Bangladesh’s Unexpected Success.

Sarah Yerkes

Sarah Yerkes is a fellow in Carnegie’s Middle East Program, where her research focuses on Tunisia’s political, economic, and security developments as well as state-society relations in the Middle East and North Africa.

Carlos Lozada

Carlos Lozada is the nonfiction book critic of the Washington Post and a Carnegie Endowment visiting scholar. He is also an adjunct professor of political journalism with the University of Notre Dame’s Washington program.

Democracies Divided books will be sold at a special discount price.​

Carnegie does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie, its staff, or its trustees.
event speakers

Thomas Carothers

Harvey V. Fineberg Chair for Democracy Studies; Director, Democracy, Conflict and Governance Program

Thomas Carothers, director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program, is a leading expert on comparative democratization and international support for democracy.

Carlos Lozada

Managing Editor, Foreign Policy

A native of Lima, Peru, Carlos Lozada worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and the Inter-American Development Bank before joining Foreign Policy magazine in 1999. He is a columnist for Commonweal magazine and has contributed to various publications, including the Christian Science Monitor, American Prospect, Wilson Quarterly, and Washington Post Book World. In 2002, he was honored as a "Global Leader for Tomorrow" by the World Economic Forum in Davos. His commentary has aired on CNBC and Marketplace.

Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for the Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where she runs a project on twenty-first century disinformation. She was a Washington Post columnist for fifteen years and a member of the editorial board. She is the author of several history books, including Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism; Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine; The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 ; and Gulag: A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

Naomi Hossain

Sarah Yerkes

Senior Fellow, Middle East Program

Sarah Yerkes is a senior fellow in Carnegie’s Middle East Program, where her research focuses on Tunisia’s political, economic, and security developments as well as state-society relations in the Middle East and North Africa.