Christopher Carothers

Dr. Christopher Carothers is the Deputy Chair of the East Asia and Pacific Area Studies Program at the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service Institute. A political scientist by training, Dr. Carothers has researched and written extensively on authoritarian politics in East Asia, with a focus on China. He is the author of Corruption Control in Authoritarian Regimes: Lessons from East Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2022) as well as numerous articles in academic and policy journals, including Perspectives on Politics, the Journal of Democracy, and Foreign Affairs. Dr. Carothers' scholarly focus on East Asia grew out of years spent living and working in the region, during which he learned Mandarin and Korean. In addition to his work at FSI, Dr. Carothers is an associated scholar at the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania and a nonresident scholar at the European Centre for North Korean Studies at the University of Vienna. He received his PhD in government from Harvard University in 2019.