FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Date: January 20, 2016
Contact: Jane Riley Jacobsen (202) 378-9700 or jane@ned.org
WASHINGTON, D.C. –The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has added three new members to its Board of Directors. Former Congressman David Skaggs, author and columnist Anne Applebaum, and Duke University lawyer and political scientist Donald Horowitz were elected at NED’s January 2016 board meeting and have all begun their first three-year term.
“These three outstanding individuals embody the highest standards of intellectual achievement and public service, and we are delighted to welcome each of them to the NED Board,” said NED president Carl Gershman. “Our grantees in every region of the world will benefit from their significant experience and insight, and their involvement will significantly aid NED’s mission of advancing democracy worldwide.”
David Skaggs represented the 2nd district of Colorado in the U.S. Congress for six terms (1987-1999), where he was a member of the House Committee on Appropriations and the House Select Committee on Intelligence. Throughout and after his time in Congress, Rep. Skaggs was committed to the cultivation of bipartisanship and to the improvement of the Congress as an institution. He co-founded the House Bipartisan Retreat and the Constitutional Forum, and is currently Co-Chair of the Board of the Office of Congressional Ethics. Rep. Skaggs is also currently a Senior Advisor with Dentons US LLP (formerly McKenna Long & Aldridge) and is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Colorado School of Law and an active Emeritus member and formerly Vice-Chair of the U. S. Public Interest Declassification Board. He served in the cabinet of Colorado Governor Bill Ritter Jr. as Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Higher Education from January, 2007, to September 2009, during which time he was a Colorado Commissioner on the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education. Prior to these positions, Skaggs was executive director of the Center for Democracy & Citizenship at the Aspen Institute and then the Council for Excellence in Government, and was Of Counsel to the Washington-based law firm, Hogan & Hartson (now HoganLovells). He has written and lectured widely.
Anne Applebaum is a columnist for the Washington Post and Slate. She directs the Transitions Forum at the Legatum Institute in London and is an adjunct fellow of the Center for European Policy Analysis. Her book Gulag: A History, narrates the history of the Soviet concentration camps system and describes daily life in the camps, making extensive use of Russian archives, as well as memoirs and interviews. Published in 2003, Gulag won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 2004. Her most recent book, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, published in 2012, describes the imposition of Soviet totalitarianism in Central Europe after the Second World War. Iron Curtain won the Cundill Prize for Historical Literature, among other prizes, and was shortlisted for the National Book Award. Formerly a member of the Washington Post editorial board, Applebaum has also worked as the Foreign and Deputy Editor of the Spectator magazine in London, as the Political Editor of the Evening Standard, and as a columnist at several British newspapers, including the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs. From 1988-1991 she covered the collapse of communism as the Warsaw correspondent of the Economist magazine.
Donald L. Horowitz is the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of Law and Political Science at Duke University. He is the author of seven books: The Courts and Social Policy (1977), which won the Louis Brownlow Award of the National Academy of Public Administration; The Jurocracy (1977), a book about government lawyers; Coup Theories and Officers’ Motives: Sri Lanka in Comparative Perspective(1980); Ethnic Groups in Conflict (1985, 2000); A Democratic South Africa? Constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society (1991), which won the Ralph Bunche Prize of the American Political Science Association; The Deadly Ethnic Riot (2001); and Constitutional Change and Democracy in Indonesia, published in 2013 by Cambridge University Press. He is currently writing a book about constitutional design, particularly for divided societies, a subject on which he has advised in a number of countries.
Horowitz has taught and lectured widely in universities and law schools in the U.S. and abroad, has held several prestigious fellowships, and in 2009, was presented with the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Section of the International Studies Association. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993, he served as President of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy from 2007 to 2010. In 2006, was appointed to the Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee on Democracy Promotion.
The National Endowment for Democracy was created in 1983 as a private, nonprofit, grant-making foundation with a mission to strengthen democratic institutions around the world through nongovernmental efforts. With an annual appropriation from the U.S. Congress, the NED Board, which is independent and bipartisan, makes more than a thousand grants each year to support prodemocracy groups in nearly 90 countries. The Endowment supports projects that promote political and economic freedom and participation, human rights, a strong civil society, independent media and the rule of law.
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