Steven Livingston

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Steven Livingston is Professor of Media and Public Affairs and the Founding Director of the Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics (IDDP). He also holds an appointment in the Elliott School of International Affairs and is a senior fellow in the Illiberal Studies Program in the Elliott School.  Livingston also founded the Public Diplomacy Institute (PDI) at GW in 2000 and served as the chairman of the Board of Directors until 2008. PDI is now the Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication.

Since 2019, Livingston has co-led two Social Science Research Council (SSRC) scholar working groups. The first working group led to the publication of The Disinformation Age (Cambridge University Press, 2020 with Lance Bennett).  The second SSRC working group led to the publication of Connective Action and the Rise of the Far-Right: Platforms, Politics, and the Crisis of Democracy (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2024 with Michael Miller). His other publications include When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina (University of Chicago Press, 2007 with W. Lance Bennett and Regina Lawrence).  It won the American Political Science Association’s Doris Graber Outstanding Book of the decade award. Other titles include Bits and Atoms: Information and Communication Technology in Areas of Limited Statehood, Oxford University Press, 2014 with Gregor Walter-Drop; Africa's Evolving Infosystems: A Pathway to Security and Stability (2011, National Defense University Press); Africa’s Information Revolution: Implications for Crime, Policing, and Citizen Security, (2013, National Defense University Press); The Terrorism Spectacle: The Politics of Terrorism and the News Media, (Westview Press, 1994; reissued by Routledge, 2020). He is also the author of the highly cited “Beyond the CNN Effect: An Examination of Media Effects According to Type of Intervention,” (1996, Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy). He is presently working on a book about digital networks, civic organizations, and authoritarianism. 

Over his three-decade-plus career at GW, Livingston has served as the director of the Political Communication Program when it was a degree-granting entity within SMPA (1996 – 2002, 2004 – 2006). In 2004, he served as director of the School of Media and Public Affairs, a position held until August 2006. He has also held several prestigious appointments at universities around the world, including in 2023 as a Senior Fellowship with The Cluster of Excellence “Contestations of the Liberal Script (SCRIPTS), Freie Universität-Berlin.  In 2021, he was named the inaugural recipient of the Fulbright Finland Foundation’s “Seeking Solutions to Global Challenges Award.” This allowed him to conduct research at the University of Helsinki. He was also awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study in Beirut, Lebanon in 2004, though he declined it to assume the position of director of SMPA. He has also been a visiting senior research fellow at the Freie Universität-Berlin; a Canterbury Fellow at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand; a Visiting Scholar at the Brookings Institution in governance; a visiting professor at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland; and a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge in Britain. In the fall of 2016 Livingston was appointed a Senior Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University where he served through summer 2019. In 1996, he was a Research Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Livingston also received a Goldsmith Award while at Harvard. From 1992-93, Livingston was a SSRC Senior Research Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies. 

Livingston has lectured at the National Defense University, the Army War College, the Strategic Studies Group at the Naval War College, the Brookings Institution, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the U.S. Institute for Peace, European Institute of Diplomacy, Vienna, the Foreign Service Institute, the U.S. Department of State, and at universities and think tanks in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. He has appeared on CNN, CNNI, ABC, CBC, BBC, Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera International and many other news organizations commenting on public policy and politics. He has also been quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Economist, The New York Times, and many other newspapers around the world. He has written for The Boston Globe, Newsday, USA Today (as a correspondent in Bosnia during the Balkan Wars), and La Stampa in Rome. His research and consulting activities have led to extended stays in Northern Ireland, Russia, Eastern and Central Europe, the Middle East, South Asia and East and Central Africa. At the invitation of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, he was in Iraq twice in 2008 and once again in 2009. At the invitation of the Canadian government and NATO, he was in Afghanistan in 2009 and 2010. He has advised a wide range of governments, the UN and NGOs on matters relating to international affairs, media, technology, and governance.  In 2019, he led GW’s successful bid for a $5 million grant to found IDDP.