Stephan Haggard

Stephan Haggard is Distinguished Research Professor at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy and Research Director for Democracy and Global Governance at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC). He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1983 and taught in the Department of Government at Harvard University from 1983 to 1991 before coming to UCSD.

He has worked on the political economy of the Asia-Pacific, with a particular focus on the Korean peninsula. He is the author of Pathways from the Periphery: The Political Economy of Growth in the Newly Industrializing Countries (1990), The Political Economy of the Asian Financial Crisis (2000) and more recently Developmental States (2018) and (with David Kang, eds.) East Asia in the World: Twelve Events That Shaped the Modern International Order (2021). His work on North Korea includes three books with Marcus Noland: Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid and Reform (2007), Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea (2011) and Hard Target: Sanctions, Inducements and the Case of North Korea (2017).

He also has a longstanding interest in transitions to and from democratic rule, including the problem of backsliding. His work on democracy and authoritarianism with Robert Kaufman includes The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions 1995); Dictators and Democrats: Masses, Elites and Regime Change (2016); and Backsliding: Democratic Regress in the Contemporary World (2021). His current research interests center on the influence of illiberal regimes on global governance: at the multilateral level, in nominally democratic international institutions such as the EU and in regional organizations dominated by authoritarian states.

From 2005 through 2022, he served as editor of the Journal of East Asian Studies. From 2011 to 2019, he ran the Witness to Transformation blog on North Korea. He has provided commentary for major news outlets, such as CNN International and writes for the Korea Economic Institute’s Peninsula blog.