Venezuela Study Group: What can the Venezuelan Democratic Forces learn from U.S. Supervised Transitions

Eva Bellin Comparativist political scientist at Brandeis University, specializing in democratization, authoritarianism, political economy, and the politics of cultural change in the Middle East. She is the Myra and Robert Kraft Professor of Arab Politics in the Department of Politics and the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. She has also taught at Johns Hopkins/SAIS, Harvard University, Hunter College, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Eloy Torres Román Venezuelan career diplomat with postings in Romania, Greece, Hungary, Cuba (in two occasions), Jamaica, Russia and Jordania. Was Director of Asia and Oceania in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Currently Professor at Universidad Central de Venezuela. He is a member of the Venezuelan Council of International Relations. His articles have appeared in several media outlets. He published recently the book Correspondencia para un venezolano de la decadencia. 

Orlando J. Pérez is a tenured Professor of Political Science and former Dean of the School of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of North Texas at Dallas (UNT Dallas), with expertise in comparative politics, Latin American politics, and U.S.–Latin American relations, with specialization on Central America, civil-military relations and on U.S.-Panama relations.

Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard.  He is Senior Fellow at the Kettering Foundation and a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions, with a focus on Latin America.   He is co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times Best-Seller and was published in 30 languages, and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point.    He has written or edited 11 other books, including Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2003), Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (with Lucan Way) (Princeton University Press, 2022).   He and Lucan Way are currently working on a book on democratic resilience across the world. 

Professor Levitsky has written for New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and The New Republic, and he has been a columnist for La Republica (Peru) and Folha de São Paulo (Brazil).

Venezuelan intellectual and former government official in his native country, has been fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and in the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, from where he coordinated the team seeking the liberation of Venezuelan judge María Lourdes Afiuni.

He has taught a variety of courses at Northeastern University, U.Mass-Lowell, Emerson College and more recently at Lesley University and in a doctorate at the Universidad del Valle de Cali, Colombia. His wide contacts with all parts of the Venezuelan democratic forces allowed him to bring a good number of them to participate in the Venezuelan Study Group.