Joel D. Barkan

Joel Barkan is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Iowa and senior associate at CSIS. A specialist on issues of democratization and governance across Anglophone Africa, he served as the first regional democracy and governance adviser for eastern and southern Africa at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), from 1992 to 1994. Since then, he has straddled the worlds of academe and policy by consulting extensively for USAID, the UN Development Program, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, and the World Bank. Dr. Barkan has been a visiting fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace (1997–1998), the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2001–2002), the University of Cape Town (2004, 2005, and 2007), and the National Endowment for Democracy (2000 and 2005–2006).   He has written extensively on democratization and governance, including articles in Foreign Affairs, American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Democracy, and World Politics. He received his A.B. from Cornell University and his Ph.D. in political science and African studies from the University of California at Los Angeles.