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CHIROT, Daniel

Professor, International Studies

Office: 201 Thomson

Phone: (206) 685-2412

email:  chirot@u.washington.edu

DANIEL CHIROT’S BIOGRAPHY

Daniel Chirot is Job and Gertrud Tamaki Professor of International Studies.  He was born in France and came to the United States when he was six years old.  He obtained a BA degree from Harvard in Social Studies in 1964, served in the Peace Corps in Niger, West Africa from 1964 to 1966, and then obtained a PhD in Sociology from Columbia University in 1973.  His PhD research on Romanian social history was published as Social Change in a Peripheral Society: The Creation of a Balkan Colony (1976), but was only translated into Romanian after the fall of communism.  He subsequently wrote three books on social change that have been used as texts in university classes: Social Change in the Twentieth Century (1977), Social Change in the Modern Era (1986), and How Societies Change (1994).  There have been Chinese, Korean, Italian, and Romanian translations of some of these texts.  He has also edited and co-edited the following books: The Causes of Backwardness in Eastern Europe (1989), The Crisis of Leninism and the Decline of the Left (1991), Essential Outsiders: Chinese and Jews in the Modern Transformation of Southeast Asia and Central Europe (with Anthony Reid, 1997), and Ethnopolitical Warfare: Causes, Consequences, and Solutions (with Martin Seligman, 2001).

Chirot founded and was the first editor of the journal, East European Politics and Societies.  This journal has been the main scholarly journal in the United States in this area since it was started in 1986 with a grant from the United States State Department.
In recent years Chirot has done research on tyranny and severe conflicts.  In 1994 he authored Modern Tyrants: The Power and Prevalence of Evil in Our Age, which later appeared in a paperback edition (1996) and a Polish translation.  In 2006 he co-authored, with Clark McCauley, Why Not Kill Them All? The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder (Princeton University Press), a study of genocidal massacres throughout history, with a policy section on how to make such events less likely in the future.  He is currently working on a book on why the Enlightenment remains important for our future.

As part of his work on conflict mitigation, since 2000 Chirot has served as an occasional consultant for CARE, particularly in the Ivory Coast where he has initiated civil society projects in the rebel zone of that divided country.  He has also done consulting work for private foundations and the government in Eastern Europe.  In 2004-2005 he was Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, DC, working on African conflicts.  Before that he received research help from the Rockefeller Foundation, a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship, a fellowship from the Institute for Human Studies in Vienna, and some Mellon Foundation funding.
After teaching at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill from 1971 to 1974, he came to the University of Washington in Seattle.  He has held visiting professorships at National Taiwan University, Northwestern University, the University of California at San Diego, Bosporus University in Istanbul, and the University of Texas in Austin.