Democratic Decline

Melissa Hooper is a senior fellow with GMF's Strategic Democracy Initiatives. She leads the team’s Rule of Law Action Network, which works to devise policy responses and solutions to issues affecting justice-sector institutions and actors. She is an attorney and policy expert with over 20 years’ experience in accountability law, high-impact litigation, and human rights advocacy. She was previously a senior adviser at USAID, led policy advocacy at Human Rights First, and served as the director for Russia at the American Bar Association's Rule of Law Initiative office in Moscow. She also was a founding member of GMF's Transatlantic Democracy Working Group, which focuses on responses to democratic backsliding in Europe and the United States.

Hooper has successfully litigated complex domestic and international cases, worked with Congress and the California state legislature to author and pass legislation, and managed coalitions and initiatives across government, academia, and civil society. She has testified repeatedly before Congress on issues of accountability for rights violations and corruption, democratic resilience, and national security. She has led international teams to secure justice in human rights cases and has contributed to policy development at the highest levels, including co-chairing the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission’s Human Rights Working Group. She has worked alongside lawyers and watchdogs in numerous countries to develop legal and policy responses to anti-democratic government action, and she initiated the first USAID program on democratic backsliding.

Nathaniel Myers is a visiting fellow within the Transatlantic Trusts at GMF, where his research focuses on foreign digital interference in democratic information spaces, democratic resilience, and exiled political movements. He brings over 15 years of experience integrating diplomacy, political analysis, and on-the-ground program management across multiple continents, with particular expertise in Eastern Europe.

Prior to joining GMF, Myers was a senior transition advisor and country representative at the US Agency for International Development, where he led and advised multimillion-dollar grant programs in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. He previously served as a policy advisor and speechwriter at the US Mission to the UN, as an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and as a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His writing on governance, democracy, and conflict issues has appeared in Foreign Policy, International New York Times, the Washington Post, and other outlets. He holds an MPA from Princeton University and a BA from Harvard University.