Daniel Chirot

Daniel Chirot, Herbert J. Ellison Professor of International Studies at the University of Washington, has authored books about social change, ethnic conflict, genocides, Eastern Europe, and tyranny.  He  co-authored Why Not Kill Them All? about political mass murder and is the author of Modern Tyrants (both published by Princeton University Press). He has edited or co-edited books on Leninism’s decline, on entrepreneurial ethnic minorities, on ethnopolitical warfare, and on the economic history of Eastern Europe.  Some of his publications have been translated into Chinese, Korean, Swedish, Finnish, Italian, German, Romanian, Polish, Hungarian, Albanian, and Lithuanian.  His most recent works are textbooks called Contentious Identities: Ethnic, Religious, and Nationalist Conflicts in Today’s World and a completely revised edition of How Societies Change.  He founded the journal East European Politics and Societies and has received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations and from the United States State Department.  He has consulted for the US Government, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Ford Foundation, and CARE.  In 2004/05 he was a Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace working on African conflicts.  He has a BA from Harvard and a PhD from Columbia.

Currently he is finishing two projects.  One is a book he is editing with Gi-Wook Shin, whose Sociology PhD is from the University of Washington and who now has a Chair at Stanford, on contrasting and conflicting memories of World War II in Europe and East Asia.  Confronting Memories of World War II: Recriminations and Reconciliations in Europe and Asia will be published by the University of Washington Press in 2014.  The other is a book he is coauthoring with Scott Montgomery about the political importance of, and debates about major ideas that stem from a few key eighteenth and nineteenth thinkers influenced by the Enlightenment and also from reactionary anti-Enlightenment intellectuals over the past two centuries.  This book will be finished in mid-2013 and will be published by Princeton University Press in late 2014.