Georgetown Americas Institute

Featuring

Thomas Carothers is director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program. Carothers is a leading authority on comparative democratization and international support for democracy, human rights, governance, the rule of law, and civil society. He has worked on democracy assistance projects for many organizations and carried out extensive field research on aid efforts around the world. He is the author or editor of 10 critically acclaimed books and many articles in prominent journals and newspapers, including most recently, Democracies Divided: The Global Challenge of Political Polarization (Brookings Press, 2019, co-edited with Andrew O'Donohue). He has been a visiting faculty member at the Central European University, Nuffield College, Oxford University, and Johns Hopkins SAIS. Prior to joining the Carnegie Endowment, Carothers practiced international and financial law at Arnold & Porter and served as an attorney adviser in the office of the legal adviser of the U.S. Department of State.

Nicolás Dip  is currently a full-time senior research professor in the History Division of the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE) and a professor at the College of Latin American Studies in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He is also a permanent participant in the University Program of Studies on Higher Education (PUEES) at UNAM. Dip holds a Ph.D. in history and a bachelor's degree in sociology from the Faculty of Humanities and Education Sciences at the National University of La Plata (UNLP) in Argentina. 

Janice Gallagher is an associate professor of political science at Rutgers University–Newark, where she is also director of research at the Sheila Y. Oliver Center for Politics & Race in America. Her work examines Latin American politics, social movements, human rights, and everyday citizenship, informed by more than two decades of collaborative research with movements in Mexico and Colombia. She is the author of Bootstrap Justice: The Search for Mexico’s Disappeared (Oxford, 2023), an award-winning study of how families of the disappeared become rights-claiming citizens amid violence and impunity. Her second book, Claim-Making in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, 2024, with Kruks-Wisner and Taylor), analyzes everyday interactions with the state across four countries. Gallagher frequently provides expert testimony in asylum cases and previously worked as a human rights accompanier and organizer. She holds a Ph.D. in government from Cornell University, an M.A. from Brown University, and a B.A. from Swarthmore College.

Diana Kapiszewski is associate professor of government, director of the Center for Latin American Studies, and co-director of the Georgetown Democracy Initiative at Georgetown University. Her research interests include comparative politics, public law, and research methods. Her work examines judicial politics and the intersections between law and politics more broadly in Latin America. Her current projects explore institutions of electoral governance in Latin America, the architecture of accountability in Latin America, and the judicialization of electoral governance in Brazil in Mexico. She also directs SIGLA (States and Institutions of Governance in Latin America, www.sigladata.org). With regard to research methods, Kapiszewski has published extensively on practices for generating qualitative data and field research and on making qualitative research transparent; she also co-directs the Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research. She has published several books with Cambridge University Press and multiple articles in Comparative Politics, Latin American Politics and Society, Law and Social Inquiry, Law & Society Review, Perspectives on Politics, PS: Political Science and Politics, and other peer- reviewed outlets. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007.

Michael Shifter is an adjunct professor at the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University and  former president of the Inter-American Dialogue. Shifter held senior positions at the Dialogue for nearly three decades and served 12 years as president; he currently serves as senior fellow at the organization. Prior to joining the Inter-American Dialogue, Shifter directed the Latin American and Caribbean program at the National Endowment for Democracy and, before that, the Ford Foundation’s governance and human rights program in the Andean region. 

Kenzo Soares Seto is a resident fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and a fellow at the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy at The New School. He previously served as a civil servant at the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation and as a professor at the School of Communication at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, the city where he was born. Additionally, he worked for 10 years as a parliamentary advisor at the municipal and state levels in Rio de Janeiro and in the Brazilian National Congress, helping strengthen dialogue between civil society and legislators.