Noam Chomsky
1928 - Present (94 years)
Noam Chomsky currently holds joint appointments at MIT as Institute Professor Emeritus, and the University of Arizona as Laureate Professor. Chomsky completed his university studies between the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. The influence of Chomksy in both linguistics and political discourse cannot be overstated; regardless of what aspect of his work you are discussing, his name always perks a few ears. Depending on who is describing him, Chomsky is either one of the most important linguists in modern times, one of the most important political thinkers, or (most often) both. Chomsky began his career squarely in academia as a professor of linguistics at MIT.
Go to ProfileJohn Rawls
1921 - 2002 (81 years)
John Bordley Rawls was an American moral and political philosopher in the liberal tradition. Rawls received both the Schock Prize for Logic and Philosophy and the National Humanities Medal in 1999, the latter presented by President Bill Clinton, in recognition of how Rawls's work "revived the disciplines of political and ethical philosophy with his argument that a society in which the most fortunate help the least fortunate is not only a moral society but a logical one".
Go to ProfileShirin Ebadi
1947 - Present (75 years)
Shirin Ebadi is an Iranian political activist, lawyer, a former judge and human rights activist and founder of Defenders of Human Rights Center in Iran. On 10 October 2003, Ebadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her significant and pioneering efforts for democracy and human rights, especially women's, children's, and refugee rights.
Go to ProfileLiu Xiaobo
1955 - 2017 (62 years)
Liu Xiaobo was a Chinese writer, literary critic, human rights activist, philosopher and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who called for political reforms and was involved in campaigns to end communist one-party rule in China. He was arrested numerous times, and has been described as China's most prominent dissident and the country's most famous political prisoner. On 26 June 2017, he was granted medical parole after being diagnosed with liver cancer, and died a few weeks later on 13 July 2017.
Go to ProfileZbigniew Brzezinski
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzeziński , or Zbig, was a Polish-American diplomat and political scientist. He served as a counselor to President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1968 and was President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor from 1977 to 1981. As a scholar, Brzezinski belonged to the realist school of international relations, standing in the geopolitical tradition of Halford Mackinder and Nicholas J. Spykman, while elements of liberal idealism have also been identified in his outlook. Brzezinski was the primary organizer of The Trilateral Commission.
Go to ProfileSamuel P. Huntington
1927 - 2008 (81 years)
Samuel Phillips Huntington was an American political scientist, adviser, and academic. He spent more than half a century at Harvard University, where he was director of Harvard's Center for International Affairs and the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor.
Go to ProfileFriedrich Hayek
1899 - 1992 (93 years)
Friedrich August von Hayek , often referred to by his initials F. A. Hayek, was an Austrian-British economist, and philosopher who is best known for his defence of classical liberalism. Hayek shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Gunnar Myrdal for their work on money and economic fluctuations, and the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena. His account of how changing prices communicate information that helps individuals coordinate their plans is widely regarded as an important achievement in economics, leading to his prize.
Go to ProfileJoseph Nye
1937 - Present (85 years)
Joseph Samuel Nye Jr. is an American political scientist. He and Robert Keohane co-founded the international relations theory of neoliberalism, which they developed in their 1977 book Power and Interdependence. Together with Keohane, he developed the concepts of asymmetrical and complex interdependence. They also explored transnational relations and world politics in an edited volume in the 1970s. More recently, he pioneered the theory of soft power and explained the distinction between it and hard power. His notion of "smart power" became popular with the use of this phrase by members of th...
Go to ProfileFrancis Fukuyama
1952 - Present (70 years)
Francis Fukuyama is director of Stanford University’s Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy and Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, as well as a senior fellow for the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Fukuyama earned a B.A. in classics from Cornell University and a Ph.D in political science from Harvard University. He has been involved with the Telluride Association, a high school outreach program, since he was an undergrad at Cornell University. Fukuyama is best known for his book, The End of History and the Last Man, in wh...
Go to ProfileRobert Keohane
1941 - Present (81 years)
Robert Owen Keohane is professor of political science at the Woodrow Wilson School for Princeton University. He earned a B.A. from Shimer College and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He held a Guggenheim fellowship and fellowships with the National Humanities Center and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Best known for his work on neoliberal institutionalism, world politics and transnational relations, he is among the most cited political science writers according to the Open Syllabus Project. He has taught at schools such as Brandeis, Harvard University, Duke University, Swarthmore College, and Stanford University.
Go to ProfileAndrei Sakharov
1921 - 1989 (68 years)
Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was a Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident, Nobel laureate, and activist for disarmament, peace and human rights. He became renowned as the designer of the Soviet Union's RDS-37, a codename for Soviet development of thermonuclear weapons. Sakharov later became an advocate of civil liberties and civil reforms in the Soviet Union, for which he faced state persecution; these efforts earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. The Sakharov Prize, which is awarded annually by the European Parliament for people and organizations dedicated to human rights and freedoms, is na...
Go to ProfileAnna Politkovskaya
1958 - 2006 (48 years)
Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya was a US-born Russian journalist, writer, and human rights activist who reported on political events in Russia, in particular, the Second Chechen War . It was her reporting from Chechnya that made Politkovskaya's national and international reputation. For seven years, she refused to give up reporting on the war despite numerous acts of intimidation and violence. Politkovskaya was arrested by Russian military forces in Chechnya and subjected to a mock execution. She was poisoned while flying from Moscow via Rostov-on-Don to help resolve the 2004 Beslan school host...
Go to ProfileJames Q. Wilson
1931 - 2012 (81 years)
James Quinn Wilson was an American academic, political scientist, and an authority on public administration. Most of his career was spent as a professor at UCLA and Harvard University. He was the chairman of the Council of Academic Advisors of the American Enterprise Institute, member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board , and the President's Council on Bioethics. He was Director of Joint Center for Urban Studies at Harvard-MIT.
Go to ProfilePeter Tatchell
1952 - Present (70 years)
Peter Gary Tatchell is a British human rights campaigner, originally from Australia, best known for his work with LGBT social movements. Tatchell was selected as the Labour Party's parliamentary candidate for Bermondsey in 1981. He was then denounced by party leader Michael Foot for ostensibly supporting extra-parliamentary action against the Thatcher government. Labour subsequently allowed him to stand in the Bermondsey by-election in February 1983, in which the party lost the seat to the Liberals. In the 1990s he campaigned for LGBT rights through the direct action group OutRage!, which he co-founded.
Go to ProfileRoméo Dallaire
1946 - Present (76 years)
Roméo Antonius Dallaire, is a Canadian humanitarian, author, retired senator and Canadian Forces lieutenant-general. Dallaire served as force commander of UNAMIR, the ill-fated United Nations peacekeeping force for Rwanda between 1993 and 1994, and attempted to stop the genocide that was being waged by Hutu extremists against the Tutsi people and Hutu moderates.
Go to ProfileHenry Kissinger
1923 - Present (99 years)
Henry Alfred Kissinger is a German-born American politician, diplomat, and geopolitical consultant who served as United States Secretary of State and National Security Advisor under the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. A Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1938, he became National Security Advisor in 1969 and U.S. Secretary of State in 1973. For his actions negotiating a ceasefire in Vietnam, Kissinger received the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize under controversial circumstances, with two members of the committee resigning in protest.
Go to ProfileAnna Hazare
1937 - Present (85 years)
Kisan Baburao "Anna" Hazare is an Indian social activist who led movements to promote rural development, increase government transparency, and investigate and punish corruption in public life. In addition to organising and encouraging grassroots movements, Hazare frequently conducted hunger strikes to further his causes—a tactic reminiscent, to many, of the work of Mahatma Gandhi. Hazare also contributed to the development and structuring of Ralegan Siddhi, a village in Parner taluka of Ahmednagar district, Maharashtra, India. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan—the third-highest civilian award—...
Go to ProfileRobert D. Putnam
1941 - Present (81 years)
Robert David Putnam is an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government. Putnam developed the influential two-level game theory that assumes international agreements will only be successfully brokered if they also result in domestic benefits. His most famous work, Bowling Alone, argues that the United States has undergone an unprecedented collapse in civic, social, associational, and political life since the 1960s, with serious negative consequences.
Go to ProfileEdward Said
1935 - 2003 (68 years)
Edward Wadie Said was a professor of literature at Columbia University, a public intellectual, and a founder of the academic field of postcolonial studies. A Palestinian American born in Mandatory Palestine, he was a citizen of the United States by way of his father, a U.S. Army veteran.
Go to ProfileHerbert A. Simon
1916 - 2001 (85 years)
Herbert Alexander Simon was an American political scientist, with a Ph.D. in political science, whose work also influenced the fields of computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology. His primary research interest was decision-making within organizations and he is best known for the theories of "bounded rationality" and "satisficing". He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1978 and the Turing Award in computer science in 1975. His research was noted for its interdisciplinary nature and spanned across the fields of cognitive science, computer science, public administration, management, and political science.
Go to ProfileLyudmila Alexeyeva
1927 - 2018 (91 years)
Lyudmila Mikhaylovna Alexeyeva was a Russian historian and human-rights activist who was a founding member in 1976 of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group and one of the last Soviet dissidents active in post-Soviet Russia.
Go to ProfileSeymour Martin Lipset
1922 - 2006 (84 years)
Seymour Martin Lipset was an American sociologist. His major work was in the fields of political sociology, trade union organization, social stratification, public opinion, and the sociology of intellectual life. He also wrote extensively about the conditions for democracy in comparative perspective. A socialist in his early life, Lipset later moved to the right, and was often considered a neoconservative.
Go to ProfileAsma Jahangir
1952 - 2018 (66 years)
Asma Jilani Jahangir was a Pakistani human rights lawyer and social activist who co-founded and chaired the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Jahangir was known for playing a prominent role in the Lawyers' Movement and served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief and as a trustee at the International Crisis Group.
Go to ProfileRobert Gilpin
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
Robert Gilpin was an American political scientist. He was Professor of Politics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University where he held the Eisenhower professorship.
Go to ProfileCharles Tilly
1929 - 2008 (79 years)
Charles Tilly was an American sociologist, political scientist, and historian who wrote on the relationship between politics and society. He was a professor of history, sociology, and social science at the University of Michigan from 1969 to 1984 before becoming the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University.
Go to ProfileHoward Zinn
1922 - 2010 (88 years)
Howard Zinn was an American historian, playwright, philosopher, socialist thinker and World War II veteran. He was chair of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, and a political science professor at Boston University. Zinn wrote over 20 books, including his best-selling and influential A People's History of the United States in 1980. In 2007, he published a version of it for younger readers, A Young People's History of the United States.
Go to ProfileSamantha Power
1970 - Present (52 years)
Samantha Power is director of the new International Peace and Security Project at Harvard Kennedy School, member of the Board of Directors at the International Refugee Assistance Project, and joint faculty for Harvard’s Law School and Kennedy School. She earned a B.A. from Yale University and a J.D. from Harvard University. It is hard to overstate Samantha Power’s influence on global affairs. After a time as a war correspondent in Yugoslavia, she returned to Harvard University to be the Founding Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. From there, she began working with then U.S.
Go to ProfileFareed Zakaria
1964 - Present (58 years)
Fareed Rafiq Zakaria is an Indian-American journalist, political commentator, and author. He is the host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS and writes a weekly paid column for The Washington Post. He has been a columnist for Newsweek, editor of Newsweek International, and an editor at large of Time.
Go to ProfileJohn Ruggie
1944 - 2021 (77 years)
John Gerard Ruggie was the Berthold Beitz Research Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and an Affiliated Professor in International Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He was an influential scholar in the field of international relations, as well as an influential policy-maker in the United Nations.
Go to ProfileElinor Ostrom
1933 - 2012 (79 years)
Elinor Claire "Lin" Ostrom was an American political economist whose work was associated with the New Institutional Economics and the resurgence of political economy. In 2009, she was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her "analysis of economic governance, especially the commons", which she shared with Oliver E. Williamson. She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Go to ProfileJeane Kirkpatrick
1926 - 2006 (80 years)
Jeane Duane Kirkpatrick was an American diplomat and political scientist who played a major role in the foreign policy of the Ronald Reagan administration. An ardent anticommunist, she was a longtime Democrat who became a neoconservative and switched to the Republican Party in 1985. After serving as Ronald Reagan's foreign policy adviser in his 1980 campaign, she became the first woman to serve as United States Ambassador to the United Nations.
Go to ProfileDing Zilin
1936 - Present (86 years)
Ding Zilin is a retired professor of philosophy and the leader of the political pressure group Tiananmen Mothers. Biography Ding, born in Shanghai on December 20, 1936, was professor of philosophy at Renmin University of China in Beijing. Her husband, Jiang Peikun , was head of the Aesthetics Institute at the university.
Go to ProfileJames C. Scott
1936 - Present (86 years)
James C. Scott is a political scientist and comparative scholar of anthropology, and the Sterling Professor of Political Science and Director of the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Williams College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Yale. After graduation, he earned a Rotary International Fellowship to study in Burma. His honors thesis studied economic development of Burma, which fortuitously opened up opportunities to work with the Central Intelligence Agency as an anti-communist organizer. His early writings were heavily based on archival field research.
Go to ProfileSteve Bannon
1953 - Present (69 years)
Stephen Kevin Bannon is an American media executive, political strategist, and former investment banker, who served as the White House's chief strategist in the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump during the first seven months of Trump's term. He is a former executive chairman of Breitbart News, and previously served on the board of the now-defunct data-analytics firm Cambridge Analytica.
Go to ProfileKenneth Waltz
1924 - 2013 (89 years)
Kenneth Neal Waltz was an American political scientist who was a member of the faculty at both the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University and one of the most prominent scholars in the field of international relations. He was a veteran of both World War II and the Korean War.
Go to ProfileAngela Davis
1944 - Present (78 years)
Angela Yvonne Davis is an American political activist, philosopher, academic, scholar, and author. She is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A Marxist, Davis was a longtime member of the Communist Party USA and is a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism . She is the author of over ten books on class, feminism, race, and the US prison system.
Go to ProfileTom Lantos
1928 - 2008 (80 years)
Thomas Peter Lantos was a Holocaust survivor and American politician who served as a U.S. Representative from California from 1981 until his death in 2008. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented the state's 11th congressional district until 1993 and from then the 12th congressional district, which both included the northern two-thirds of San Mateo County and a portion of the southwestern part of San Francisco after redistricting.
Go to ProfileJohan Galtung
1930 - Present (92 years)
Johan Galtung is a principal founder of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, as well as a pioneering thought leader and scholar in the area of peace and conflict studies. He earned two Ph.Ds - a cand. real. in mathematics and a mag. art. in sociology - from the University of Oslo. Galtung is widely known for his scholarship in sociology, microhistory, anthropology, political science, economics, and history, and most notably, for his work in peace and conflict studies. He has published more than 100 books and 1,000 articles – an astounding body of work. In 2004, he predicted that the United Stat...
Go to ProfileNasrin Sotoudeh
1963 - Present (59 years)
Nasrin Sotoudeh is a human rights lawyer in Iran. She has represented imprisoned Iranian opposition activists and politicians following the disputed June 2009 Iranian presidential elections as well as prisoners sentenced to death for crimes committed when they were minors. Her clients have included journalist Isa Saharkhiz, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi, and Heshmat Tabarzadi. She has also represented women arrested for appearing in public without a hijab, which is a punishable offence in Iran. Nasrin Sotoudeh was the subject of Nasrin, a 2020 documentary filmed in secret in Iran ab...
Go to ProfileGiovanni Sartori
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
Giovanni Sartori was an Italian political scientist who specialized in the study of democracy, political parties and comparative politics. Biography Born in Florence in 1924, Sartori graduated in Political and Social Sciences at the University of Florence in 1946. He stayed on at he University of Florence, teaching History of Modern Philosophy and Doctrine of the State starting in 1946. He became a lecturer in Modern Philosophy and in Political Science , and subsequently professor of Sociology . Sartori became full professor of Political Science and taught at Florence University from 1966 to...
Go to ProfileDavid Easton
1917 - 2014 (97 years)
David Easton was a Canadian-born American political scientist. Easton, who was born in Toronto, Ontario, came to the United States in 1943. From 1947 to 1997, he served as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago.
Go to ProfileHarry Wu
1937 - 2016 (79 years)
Harry Wu was a Chinese-American human rights activist. Wu spent 19 years in Chinese labor camps, and he became a resident and citizen of the United States. In 1992, he founded the Laogai Research Foundation.
Go to ProfileImmanuel Wallerstein
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein was an American sociologist and economic historian. He is perhaps best known for his development of the general approach in sociology which led to the emergence of his world-systems approach. He was a Senior Research Scholar at Yale University from 2000 until his death in 2019, and published bimonthly syndicated commentaries through Agence Global on world affairs from October 1998 to July 2019.
Go to ProfileLeon Sullivan
1922 - 2001 (79 years)
Leon Howard Sullivan was a Baptist minister, a civil rights leader and social activist focusing on the creation of job training opportunities for African Americans, a longtime General Motors Board Member, and an anti-Apartheid activist. Sullivan died on April 24, 2001, of leukemia at a Scottsdale, Arizona, hospital. He was 78.
Go to ProfileCharles E. Lindblom
1917 - 2018 (101 years)
Charles Edward Lindblom was an American academic who studied Economics at the University of Chicago and was Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Economics at Yale University. He served as President of the American Political Science Association and the Association for Comparative Economic Studies, as well as Director of Yale's Institution for Social and Policy Studies.
Go to ProfileStephen Walt
1955 - Present (67 years)
Stephen Walt is professor of international affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He earned a B.A. from Stanford University and an M.A. and Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley. A scholar of the realist school, he is the author of balance of threat theory (as opposed to conventional balance of power theory). Among the books he has written are, The Origins of Alliances, Taming American Power, and, in 2018, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy. Walt is known to be critical of America’s propensity for milita...
Go to ProfileCoretta Scott King
1927 - 2006 (79 years)
Coretta Scott King was an American author, activist, civil rights leader, and the wife of Martin Luther King Jr. As an advocate for African-American equality, she was a leader for the civil rights movement in the 1960s. King was also a singer who often incorporated music into her civil rights work. King met her husband while attending graduate school in Boston. They both became increasingly active in the American civil rights movement.
Go to ProfileGloria Steinem
1934 - Present (88 years)
Gloria Marie Steinem is an American feminist journalist and social political activist who became nationally recognized as a leader and a spokeswoman for the American feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Go to ProfileArmando Valladares
1937 - Present (85 years)
Armando Valladares Perez is a Cuban-American poet, diplomat and human rights activist. In 1960, he was arrested by the Cuban government for conflicting reasons; the Cuban government alleged that he had been complicit in anti-Castro terrorism, while foreign sources regarded his arrest as being due to his protesting communism, leading Amnesty International to name him a prisoner of conscience.
Go to ProfileRaif Badawi
1984 - Present (38 years)
Raif bin Muhammad Badawi is a Saudi writer, dissident and activist, as well as the creator of the website Free Saudi Liberals. Badawi was arrested in 2012 on a charge of "insulting Islam through electronic channels" and brought to court on several charges, including apostasy. In 2013 he was convicted on several charges and sentenced to seven years in prison, torture and 600 lashes. In 2014 his sentence was increased to 10 years in prison, 1,000 lashes, and a fine. The flogging was to be carried out over 20 weeks. The first 50 lashes were administered on 9 January 2015. The second flogging has been postponed more than twelve times.
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