Ian Shapiro, Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale, examines how democracies form and how they survive. This DeVane Lecture, part of his course Power and Politics in Today's World, walks through the four historical waves of democratization and four types of democratic transitions before turning to negotiated settlements. Shapiro compares South Africa's transition from apartheid, the Northern Ireland peace process, and unresolved conflict in the Middle East to ask why some negotiated settlements produce stable, inclusive democracies while others collapse or exclude key groups. He frames the discussion against the arc from the post-Cold War optimism of the early 1990s to today's politics of fear and resentment, material developed further in his book After the Fall. Delivered to a mixed audience of Yale students and the public in fall 2019, the lecture runs about 75 minutes and builds a comparative framework rather than a single case study.