Deborah J. Yashar

Director, Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS)
Donald E. Stokes Professor of Public and International Affairs
Professor of Politics and International Affairs
Princeton University

Office Hours | Spring 2023 (via Bookings)

https://outlook.office365.com/owa/calendar/[email protected]/bookings/s/rGiGdqR_4kSrB4xJuusmPw2

Deborah J. Yashar is Director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS), Donald E. Stokes Professor of Public and International Affairs, and Professor of Politics & International Affairs at Princeton University. Her scholarship addresses regime politics (democracy and authoritarianism), violence, states in the developing world, citizenship rights, social movements, ethnic politics, and immigration politics.

Yashar is author of three books and coeditor of four volumes, including Homicidal Ecologies: Illicit Economies and Complicit States in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2018); Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: The Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Postliberal Challenge (Cambridge University Press, 2005); Demanding Democracy: Reform and Reaction in Costa Rica and Guatemala (Stanford University Press, 1997); The Inclusionary Turn in Latin American Democracies (Cambridge University Press, 2021, coedited with Diana Kapizewski and Steve Levitsky); States in the Developing World (Cambridge University Press, 2017, coedited with Miguel A. Centeno and Atul Kohli); Parties Movements and Democracy in the Developing World (Cambridge University Press, 2016, coedited with Nancy Bermeo); and Routledge Handbook of Latin American Politics (Routledge, 2012, coedited with Peter Kingstone). She has also authored numerous articles, books chapters, and reports.

Yashar is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University; a visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; and a fellow at the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She has also received fellowships and awards from the Joint Committee on Latin American Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council, the United States Institute of Peace, and Princeton's Class of 1934 University Preceptorship, among others. She received Best Book awards for Homicidal Ecologies (awarded by the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization section, now called Democracy and Autocracy section) and for Contesting Citizenship (awarded by the New England Council on Latin American Studies).

She has co-chaired (with John Ferejohn) the Advisory Committee for the Anxieties of Democracy project at the Social Science Research Project and has served on the editorial committee of various journals, including World Politics, APSR and Perspectives on Politics. Former leadership positions include Editor of World Politics; Director of Princeton’s Program in Latin American Studies (PLAS); Director of the Princeton’s Fung Global Fellows Program; co-Director of Princeton’s Project on Democracy and Development; and President of APSA’s Politics & History Section. She also served on the Steering Committee for APSA’s Qualitative Transparency Deliberations and APSA’s ethics committee.

Yashar received her doctorate in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining the Princeton faculty, she was a junior faculty member at Harvard University.