Ashley Quarcoo is a democracy scholar and practitioner with over 15 years of experience working on democratic development globally and in the United States. Most recently, she was the senior director of democracy programs and pillars with the Partnership for American Democracy, where she led policy, programs, and coalition engagement.
Prior to joining the Partnership, Quarcoo was a senior fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program. Her research focused on threats to democracy, social and political polarization, and comparative approaches toward building social cohesion and democratic renewal. Quarcoo also recently served as senior research manager with the Aspen Institute’s Citizenship and American Identity Program, where she designed and managed “Who Is Us? A Project on American Identity.” She spent over a decade supporting peace-building and democratic development in post-conflict countries and countries transitioning out of authoritarianism. She worked for the US Agency for International Development, where she supported strategy, policy, and program development for a nearly $300 million democracy, human rights, and governance foreign assistance portfolio. She has also served with the State Department, as a legislative aide on Capitol Hill, and as a Teach for America corps member in New York City.
Quarcoo was a 2020–2021 visiting fellow at SNF Agora Institute, where she led the Race, Memory, and Democracy Project, and a 2019–2020 Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow.