Global power, politics and economics.

Highlights

Best-selling author Amy Chua offers audiences truly revolutionary insights into global power, politics and economics. She is changing the context of global economics and international politics with an indispensable message for any organization interested in either one.

She is the author of two extraordinary books. Her most recent book, Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance—and Why They Fall, examines history’s handful of dominant world powers to reveal the reasons behind their success and the roots of their ultimate demise.

As the latest hyperpower, the United States has so far followed the historical pattern. At a crucial moment in the life of the nation, Ms. Chua offers the lessons of history as guidance for the most important questions about America’s future.

In her bestseller World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, Professor Chua offers audiences a fundamentally new perspective on how to sustain globalization by finding ways to spread its benefits while curbing its most destructive aspects.

Amy Chua’s books and presentations reflect both personal experience and intelligent observation of what actually happens when free market democracy reaches some of the world’s most volatile regions.

Amy Chua is John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She also has taught law at Duke, Stanford, and New York Universities. She has been a Wall Street lawyer who worked on the privatization of Telmex, the national telephone company of Mexico.

Ms. Chua is articulate and passionate, and uniquely qualified, as a member herself of the market-dominant Chinese minority of the Philippines, to present this important topic.

Day of Empire

"If the history of hyperpowers has shown anything, it is the danger of xenophobic backlash. Time and again, past world-dominant powers have fallen precisely when their core groups turned intolerant, reasserting their ‘true’ or ‘pure’ identity and adopting exclusionary policies toward ‘unassimilable’ groups."

Persia, Rome, Tan China, the Mongols, the Dutch, the British, and now the United States—all have risen to dominate their world as a sole hyperpower. In Day of Empire, Amy Chua finds the common threads in their histories that have fostered their global dominance: each was, by the standards of its own time, extraordinarily pluralistic and tolerant. And each fell because its diversity ultimately triggered conflict, hatred and violence.

Now the U.S. may finally have reached such a "tipping point" in which various forces are triggering a backlash against the American tradition of cultural openness. Will America follow the same trajectory toward decline as the hyperpowers of the past? Or will she find a new way forward through the tensions that her multicultural pluralism has awakened?

Ms. Chua has given us a unique approach to history and its lessons and the same kind of truly fresh insights into the dynamics of world power that made her first book, World on Fire, both a bestseller. Like World on Fire, Day of Empire also promises to be a major contribution to our understanding of globalization and international affairs.

World on Fire

Best Book of the Year, strategy+business magazine
Best Book of the Year, The Economist
Bestseller, BusinessWeek and New York Times

Running contrary to the popular belief that exporting free market democracy will stimulate developing countries’ economies and promote peace, World on Fire is a dire warning of the potentially catastrophic consequences of globalization. Most developing countries have one or more economically dominant ethnic minorities coexisting with an impoverished "indigenous" majority. In such cases, rapid marketization combined with superficial democratization tends to feed tensions between these groups, because markets will benefit the market-dominant minority, while democracy will increase the power of the relatively impoverished majority. One of three outcomes are likely:

• an ethnically fueled antimarket backlash,
• actions directed at eliminating the market dominant minority, or
• a retreat from democracy that protects the market-dominant minority’s interests.

In case after case, ‘ballot box democracy’ combined with rapid globalization has ignited ethnic hatreds, unleashed terrible violence and disrupted or destroyed economies. The former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and modern-day Iraq are just some of the most well-known examples.

Professor Chua has discovered that the tools that successful developed societies have used to defuse these tensions usually fail in developing countries. She proposes alternative reforms that would lead to the long-term success of markets and democracy in the developing world.

Credentials

• World on Fire a New York Times and BusinessWeek bestseller; selected one of Best Books of 2003, The Economist
• Executive Editor, Harvard Law Review
• Distinguished Teaching Award, Yale Law School
• International Affairs Fellowship, Council on Foreign Relations
• Clerked for Chief Judge Patricia Wald of the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit
• Worked on international transactions throughout Asia, Europe and Latin America with the Wall Street firm, Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton
• Visiting Professor, Columbia, Stanford and NYU law schools and Associate Professor at Duke Law School
• Teaches contracts, law and development, international business transactions, ethnic conflict, and law and globalization

Areas of Expertise

international business

ethnic conflict

law and development

globalization and the law