This panel discussion was hosted by Northwestern University’s Center for International & Area Studies in partnership with the Evanston Public Library.

Speakers:

June Cross is a writer, filmmaker, and Professor of Journalism at the Columbia Journalism School, where she is Director of the Documentary Journalism Program. She is the director of the PBS Frontline documentary WHOSE VOTE COUNTS, which investigates voter suppression and the 2020 presidential election. She has been a producer for Frontline and CBS News. She covered the 1980 and 1984 Presidential campaigns for the PBS NewsHour. Her autobiographical film Secret Daughter, which examined how race and color impacted her family, won an Emmy and a duPont-Columbia Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism.

Rachel Beatty Riedl is Director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University, where she is also John S. Knight Professor of International Studies, and Professor in the Department of Government. She is the author of Authoritarian Origins of Democratic Party Systems in Africa (2014) and co-author of From Pews to Politics: Religious Sermons and Political Participation in Africa (2019). She chairs the Comparative Democratization section of the American Political Science Association and co-hosts Ufahamu Africa, a podcast about African politics. Previously, she taught political science and was Director of the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University.

Maria J. Stephan is co-author (with Erica Chenoweth) of Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (2012), which was awarded the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. She is also the co-author of Bolstering Democracy: Lessons Learned and the Path Forward (2018) and co-editor of Is Authoritarianism Staging a Comeback? (2015). She served in the U.S. State Department from 2009-2014, where she worked on Afghanistan and Syria; she co-directed the Atlantic Council's Future of Authoritarianism initiative; and was Research Director at the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.

Jeffrey C. Isaac is the James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University. He is the author of #AgainstTrump: Notes from Year One (2018), Democracy in Dark Times (1998), and Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion (1992). He is former Editor in Chief of Perspectives on Politics, a flagship journal of the American Political Science Association. He writes a column for Public Seminar is a co-convener of the Democracy Seminar, a forum, initiated by the New School, for activists and thinkers who support democracy against the looming global threats of authoritarianism. In March he drafted and circulated an Open Letter from political scientists titled “We Must Urgently Work to Guarantee Free and Fair Democratic Elections in November.”

Daniel Schneiderman is Head of Advocacy & Research for the US Program of the International Crisis Group, an independent organization that “sounds the alarm to prevent deadly conflict” around the world. Daniel worked at the White House's National Security Council as the Director for Yemen under Presidents Obama and Trump. He also spent two and a half years working on the State Department’s Syria Desk, and an assignment to the Joint Chiefs of Staff's Directorate of Strategy, Policy, and Operations. He worked on the International Crisis Group’s October 2020 report "The U.S. Presidential Election: Managing the Risks of Violence."

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