Jack A. Goldstone (PhD Harvard) is the Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, Jr., Chair Professor of Public Policy at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, in Arlington Virginia. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Mercatus Center and a Global Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars. Goldstone previously taught at Northwestern University and the University of California, and has been a visiting scholar at Cambridge University, the California Institute of Technology, Konstanz University (Germany), Chuo University (Japan) and the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration.
Professor Goldstone has spent his career studying revolutions, social protest, and democracy. In the process, he became a champion for integrating the study of population change into comparative politics and international relations. Goldstone is the author of Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (awarded the 1993 Distinguished Scholarly Research Award of the American Sociological Association) and fifteen other books and almost two hundred research articles on topics in politics, economics, and long-term social change. He has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford University, the Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National University, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He has been the Richard Holbrooke Distinguished Lecturer at the American Academy in Berlin, and has won Fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, the U.S. Institute for Peace, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He has also received the Arnoldo Momigliano Prize of the Historical Society, the Myron Weiner Award for Lifetime Achievement from the International Studies Association, and was named a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar for 2010-2011.
Goldstone led a National Academy of Sciences study of USAID democracy assistance, and worked with USAID, DIFD, and the US State and Defense Departments on developing their operations in fragile states. His latest books are Why Europe? The Rise of the West 1500-1850 (McGraw-Hill, 2008), Political Demography: How Population Changes are Reshaping International Security and National Politics (Oxford, 2012), and Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford 2014). Two edited works – The International Handbook of Population Policies and The Handbook of Revolutions of the 21st Century – will be published in 2022 by Springer.
Professor Goldstone is active with the Council on Foreign Relations, the Aspen Institute, and has written for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Hill, Politico; he has also appeared on CNN, Al-Jazeera and other foreign media. He has recently been a guest on numerous podcasts to talk about the risks of political violence in America – a topic on which he hoped he would not have to apply his expertise on fragile states.
