Grzegorz Ekiert is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Government at Harvard University and senior scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.
For more than a decade, he was director of Harvard’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (2012-2024) and chair of the university’s social studies undergraduate concentration (2000-2006).
His research and teaching interests focus on comparative politics, regime change and democratization, civil society and social movements, and East European politics and societies.
He is the author and editor of several books and special issues of academic journals including: Ruling by Other Means: State-Mobilized Movements (co-editors Elizabeth J. Perry and Yan Xiaojun, Cambridge University Press, 2020); Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe: Assessing the Legacy of Communist Rule (co-editor Stephen Hanson, Cambridge University Press, 2003); Rebellious Civil Society. Popular Protest and Democratic Consolidation in Poland (co-author Jan Kubik, University of Michigan Press 1999); and The State Against Society: Political Crises and Their Aftermath in East Central Europe (Princeton University Press, 1996).
He has also authored over one hundred papers and chapters published in social science journals in the U.S., Europe, and Asia and in edited volumes. He served as an advisory board member of the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (2016-2024) and as external examiner in politics, public administration, and global studies at the University of Hong Kong (2012-2018) and is a member of several advisory boards at social science research institutions and NGOs.
His November 2024 paper with Noah Dasanaike on the rise of dictatorship was published in the Journal of Democracy.
