Biography
Daniel Chirot was born in France and came to the United States when he was six years old. He has been an American citizen since 1956. He obtained a BA degree (Magna Cum Laude) from Harvard in Social Studies in 1964, served in the Peace Corps in Niger, West Africa from 1964 to 1966, and then obtained a PhD in Sociology from Columbia University in 1973. His PhD research on Romanian social history was published as Social Change in a Peripheral Society: The Creation of a Balkan Colony (Academic Press 1976), but was only translated into Romanian after the fall of communism. He subsequently wrote three books on social change that have been used as texts in university classes: Social Change in the Twentieth Century (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1977), Social Change in the Modern Era (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1986), and How Societies Change (Pine Forge / Sage 1994). In 2011 a completely revised edition of How Societies Change was published by Sage. There have been Chinese, Korean, Italian, and Romanian translations of some of these texts. He has also edited and co-edited the following books: The Causes of Backwardness in Eastern Europe (University of California Press 1989), The Crisis of Leninism and the Decline of the Left (University of Washington Press 1991), Essential Outsiders: Chinese and Jews in the Modern Transformation of Southeast Asia and Central Europe (with Anthony Reid, University of Washington Press 1997), and Ethnopolitical Warfare: Causes, Consequences, and Solutions (with Martin Seligman, American Psychological Association Press 2001).
Chirot was the founding first editor of the journal, East European Politics and Societies. This has been the main scholarly journal in the United States in this area since he started it in 1986 with a grant from the United States State Department and the American Council of Learned Societies.
In recent years Chirot has done research on tyranny and severe conflicts. In 1994 he authored Modern Tyrants: The Power and Prevalence of Evil in Our Age (Free Press), which later appeared in a paperback edition (Princeton University Press 1996) and a Polish translation. He co-authored, with Clark McCauley, Why Not Kill Them All? The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder (Princeton University Press 2006), a study of genocidal massacres throughout history, with a policy section on how to make such events less likely in the future. There is a second, paperback edition (2010) and translations have been published in Chinese, Swedish, and Finnish.
In 2011 his most recent work, to be used as a short college class text, was published as Contentious Identities: Ethnic, Religious, and Nationalist Conflicts in Today’s World (Routledge).
Some of his many scholarly articles have also been published in Chinese, Korean, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Lithuanian, Polish, and Italian translations. He has given invited guest lectures in many American Universities as well as in the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Romania, Poland, Russia, Mexico, Turkey, Israel, Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Bangladesh.
As part of his work on conflict mitigation, he has served as an occasional consultant for CARE, particularly in Niger and in the Ivory Coast where he initiated civil society projects in the rebel zone of that divided country during its civil war in the early to mid-2000s. He has also done consulting work for the Ford Foundation, USAID, and the National Endowment for Democracy. He has served on fellowship and grant selection boards for the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for Humanities, The US Institute of Peace, the International Research and Exchange Board, the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright, and the Mellon Foundation as well as serving on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals. In 2004-2005 he was Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington DC, working on African conflicts. Before that he received research help from the Rockefeller Foundation, a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship, a resident senior fellowship from the Institute for Human Studies in Vienna, and some Mellon Foundation funding.
After teaching at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill from 1971 to 1974, he came to the University of Washington in Seattle. He has held visiting professorships in sociology and political science departments at National Taiwan University in Taipei, Northwestern University, the University of California at San Diego, Bosporus University in Istanbul, and the University of Texas in Austin.
He is currently the Herbert J. Ellison Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the University of Washington.