The Assault on the State

The Moynihan Institute in partnership with the Campbell Institute welcomes Stephen E. Hanson from William & Mary, and Jeffrey S. Kopstein from the University of California, Irvine. 

Across the world, in countries as diverse as Hungary, Israel and the U.S., attacks on the modern state and its workforce are intensifying. These attacks are led by self-aggrandizing politicians who attempt to seize control of the state for themselves and their cronies. What replaces the modern state—professional  government agencies organized under the rule of law—once it is fatally undermined is an earlier, more destructive form of politics: the rule of men. In their new book, “The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future,” Hanson and Kopstein describe the dangers of state erosion and outline a strategy that can reverse this destructive trend.

Book signing to follow.

Stephen E. Hanson is the Lettie Pate Evans Professor in the Department of Government at William & Mary, where he previously served as vice provost for academic and international affairs (2011–2022) and director of the Reves Center for International Studies (2011–2021).

Harvard-educated scholar with a Ph.D. in political science from UC Berkeley, Hanson is an expert on post-communist Russia, comparative political ideologies, and institutional change. His books include “Post-Imperial Democracies” and “Time and Revolution,” the latter receiving the 1998 Wayne S. Vucinich Award.

He has held visiting positions at Harvard, Yale and Oxford, and served as team lead for Russian domestic politics in the Obama 2008 foreign policy advisory group. Hanson has received prestigious teaching awards, significant grant funding, and lectured widely at leading academic and policy institutions globally. He also serves on several journal editorial boards and the board of advisors for the National Bureau of Asian Research.

Jeffrey Kopstein is Dean’s Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. In his research, Kopstein focuses on interethnic violence, voting patterns of minority groups, antisemitism and anti-liberal tendencies in civil society. These interests are central topics in his latest books, “Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust” (Cornell University Press, 2018), “Politics, Memory, Violence: The New Social Science of the Holocaust” (Cornell University Press, 2023), and “The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers our Future” (Polity, 2024).